Description
The Lord Has Blessed Thee: Eliza Roberts Cox
Eliza Roberts was born in 1817 in Gloucestershire, England into a family of 8 children. When she was 19, she married John Cox. It appears likely that John and Eliza were among those converted through the efforts of Wilford Woodruff and others in 1840. They were baptized by Daniel Browett.
On February 6, 1841, a group of 109 saints departed Liverpool aboard the sailing ship, Echo, bound for America. Records indicate that one of their children passed away and was buried at sea.
They lived in the Nauvoo 2nd Ward and two more children came. After the martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph, John and Eliza left Nauvoo in May 1846. Once they arrived at the Missouri River, Captain James Allen of the United States Army came seeking recruits to enlist in the army to fight in the war against Mexico. July 16, 1846, John Cox, the recent emigrant from England, was sworn in and assigned to Company E. They marched away shortly after, leaving wives and families behind.
Eliza took her children and moved across the Missouri River to Cutler’s Park. While there, in November, she gave birth to a little girl, Sarah, in a wagon box. She moved into a small cabin, 10 feet square, with her four children. Then disease settled into the family. Three-year-old Mariah died, and the baby, Sarah.
Eliza was forced by the United States government to move her family back to the Iowa side of the Missouri River. Meanwhile, John was discharged from the Army on July 16, 1847, in Los Angeles. He traveled north and spent the winter working for John Sutter in building a mill. He was there when gold was discovered in the American River in January 1848.
In June 1848, John set out with others of the Battalion boys, to go east and find his wife and family. On June 28, three men went ahead in a scouting party to find a route over the Sierra Nevada mountains. They did not return. Later those men were found mutilated, murdered, and buried, likely killed by Native Americans. The men killed were Ezra Allen, Henderson Cox, and, tragically, the man who had been instrumental in John’s conversion back in England, Daniel Browett.
Word spread east of the murders, reaching Eliza Cox on the Missouri, except that she was told that the murdered man was not Henderson Cox, but John Cox, her beloved husband. Eliza was so afflicted by the awful news that she was reduced to what she described as “hysterical fits.” Even after she learned her husband was still alive, the affliction continued the rest of her life.
John eventually found Eliza on the Missouri and there they remained in order to make enough money to outfit for the journey west. Another daughter, Eliza Jane, was born. By 1853, they came west and settled in Grantsville. Here, twin girls were born, Martha Marinda and Margaret Ellen. Later they settled in South Weber where several more children joined the family. In all, Eliza said she gave birth to 12 children, gifts from the bosom of God, her patriarchal blessing said. Of those 12 children, only six lived to adulthood.
On December 29, 1867, John and Eliza received their endowments and were sealed in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City by Heber C. Kimball. Two years later, 1869, they moved to Oxford, Idaho where they farmed and raised their children.
April 1, 1878, John Cox died in Oxford. Eliza lived on, moved to Vernal, Utah with her daughters and lived “in a humble log home with very few possessions.”
When exactly she passed away—no one knows for sure, but it was sometime in 1890. She lies buried in an unmarked grave in the Vernal, Utah cemetery. Has she been forgotten?
Eliza left her land, home, and family to join the saints in Zion. While her husband gave his all to the Mormon Battalion, Eliza kept the faith and her home and hearth together. She never had much of the world’s goods and she lost so many children along the way. Yet, she was “humble and faithful to the end.” Her patriarchal blessing, given under the hands of Isaac Morley, promises, “Thy children will honor thee and revere thy counsel. They will preserve thy name and memory from generation to generation.”
And so they shall. She was my third great grandmother.
Source:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/memories/KWJT-35C
Glenn Rawson
