Description

Don’t Cry My Little Dears

Joseph Ainsworth and his wife Mary joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in England, during the first mission of Heber C. Kimball in 1837. On July 4, 1854, a daughter, Mary Jane was born bringing the family to five. When Mary Jane was only two years old, her father passed away. Then in 1862, the family sailed to America on the steamship Manchester. There was Mary Jane, her mother, and her two older brothers, Joseph and James. They landed at Castle Gardens, New York and then made their way to Florence, Nebraska where they joined up with the Henry Miller wagon company. Mary Jane’s mother was ill the entirety of the voyage across the sea and was still not well as they began their journey across the plains on August 5, 1862.

One day somewhere along the trail it was late in the day and almost time for the company to make camp. Mary Jane and her brother went out to gather buffalo chips for their evening cook fire. Mary Jane and her brother were so intent on their work that they wandered out some distance from the road and failed to notice the train move on. They quickly became lost as the darkness closed in upon them. Their terror was even more as the wolves began to howl all around them. They were far out away from civilization with no one to help them.

Remembering what their mother had taught them, they knelt down and asked Heavenly Father to “keep them from harm and to guide them safely to where the company was camped.”

According to the family history:

Soon after this, they saw an old lady who said to them, “Don’t cry my little dears, I’ll take you to the camp; follow me.” She was not a member of their camp and when she had led them nearly to their camp, she disappeared.

When the children related the experience to their mother, she told them the old lady was surely an angel sent to help them. “And who can doubt that mother’s word, for what mortal being would there be on that trackless waste so far from human habitation alone at night.”

Mary Jane and her family came on safely to the Salt Lake Valley. Her mother remarried in 1865. Then, one year later, Mary Jane’s stepfather was injured and died a few days later.

On the same day that he died their wheat stacks, hay, and everything they had, burned to the ground. The shock of losing everything they had, and her husband’s death, was too much for the already weakened body of the little mother and she died a week later. She passed to her final rest Oct. 1866. Her last words to her daughter [Mary Jane] were, “My dear, never leave the Gospel. It is true and I want to meet you on the other side.”

Mary Jane never left the gospel. She became the mother of ten children, a nurse, a primary president for twenty years, and faithful daughter of God. She is buried in Brigham City, Utah.

Source:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/KWJD-JGD