A gunner from Dolgellau
John Roberts was born in Dolgellau on 6 January 1820, one of four children but the only son of soldier John, a bugler in the Royal Merioneth Militia, and Mary. In 1840 he followed in his father’s footsteps, enlisting in the Army as a gunner. Three years later he transferred to the Royal Horse Artillery, stationed in Woolwich, Kent, England.
It was there that he met Adelaide Catherine Ford. At the age of 17 she was cooking for the Red Coats. Her father was also a member of the Royal Horse Artillery.
He married Adelaide Ford on 5 January 1847. In December of that year, their first son, John Roberts Jr., was born at the Dockyard in Woolwich. In August of 1848 John purchased his discharge from the Army due to rheumatism in his right arm making him unfit for duty.
They moved back to Wales, settling in Tredegar where John opened a shop and later a second shop in Merthyr Tydfil. In 1849 they joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Amazon, 1863
On 4 June 1863 the Roberts family crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a three-decker sailing vessel called the Amazon with about 890 other emigrants and were on the water six weeks, landing in New York on the 18 July. John’s mother wanted them to leave their eldest son in Wales with her. He later wrote:
She was well-to-do in this world’s goods and could have done much for me in a material way, but she was not a member of the Mormon Church, in fact she had no use for them, she being Catholic.
For all her wealth, John’s son never regretted leaving Wales. He reported that money could not compensate for the joy he received from his membership in the Church.
Dickens goes aboard
Charles Dickens went aboard the Amazon in the Thames before she sailed, and wrote about her emigrants in The Uncommercial Traveller. He was a visitor, not a passenger; his own account describes going on board and then over the ship’s side again.
Now I have seen emigrant ships before this day in June. And these people are so strikingly different from all other people in like circumstances whom I have seen, that I wonder aloud ‘what would a stranger suppose these emigrants to be!’ I should have said they were in their degree the pick and flower of England….
I afterwards learned that the captain sent a dispatch home before he struck out in the wide Atlantic, highly extolling the behavior of these emigrants, and the perfect order and propriety of all their social arrangements….
I went on board their ship to bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the Amazon’s side feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.
Two yoke of oxen and one of cows
They arrived in New York 18 July 1863, from where they travelled to St Louis, Missouri, by train, and then by boat up the Missouri River to Florence, Nebraska. From Florence they crossed the plains in a covered wagon with the Thomas E. Ricks company, arriving in Salt Lake City 4 October 1863. It took them about four months to complete their journey.
Their oldest son, John Jr., who was fifteen years old, drove two yoke of oxen and one yoke of cows all the way across the plains from Florence. At the age of seventeen he returned to the Platte River to help the Thomas Taylor Company into the Salt Lake Valley.
The Roberts family moved to Lehi on 1 November 1863. For the first few weeks they lived with the Joseph Colledge, Sr. family and then they bought a home from Jesse Martin, one block south of the old meetinghouse, on the opposite side of the street. In Lehi John became a farmer and stock raiser. He helped to build the city during the pioneer days. Four more children were born to John and Adelaide Roberts between 1863 and 1871.
Back to Wales, 1871
In the spring of 1871 John was called on a mission to Wales. He was set apart 1 May 1871 and left his wife in charge of his farm, newborn daughter, and eight other children. He arrived in Liverpool 22 May 1871 and was assigned as a Traveling Elder in the Glamorgan Conference. His mission was cut short, however, due to ill health, and he returned to New York on the SS Nevada on 26 June 1872.
The Millennial Star reported the following:
On this ship we have returning to their families and friends in Utah elder George Reynolds, who has been faithfully laboring in the Liverpool Office for the year past, who is now released because of ill health, and Elder John Roberts, who has been laboring in Wales for a year past. These elders are returning to their homes with our heartfelt blessing and our earnest prayer is that they, with the Saints who accompany them, may have a safe, speedy, and pleasant journey, arrive safely in Zion and be found worthy to partake of the blessings that are in store for the faithful.
Their trip back, however, was difficult due to storms at sea, but they did eventually arrive back safely. In 1874 John and Adelaide had their eleventh child. Nine of the eleven lived to adulthood.
It is reported that John’s mother tried repeatedly to get him to leave the church and return to Wales, offering him a substantial inheritance if he would do so, but he refused and instead tried to get her to move to Utah, but she would not go. She died alone in 1880, leaving everything she had to the Catholic Church.
When John returned to Utah from his mission in 1872 he brought with him fine linen to make temple clothes for himself and his wife. Linen was almost unknown in Utah. John and Adelaide were buried in those temple clothes.
“Beloved and respected by all who knew him”
Both John and Adelaide were highly thought of in their community in Lehi, Utah, as can be seen from the newspaper reports of their funerals.
The clippings add detail the family account does not: that Adelaide was born in Ireland and married in 1847, that the couple joined the Church in 1849 and came to Utah in 1863, that she was the mother of eleven children and left a large posterity, and that at John’s death he left ten children, fifty-five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. The speakers at her funeral were Elder Levi Phillips and President A. J. Evans; at his, Elders Dilbert Allred, George Zimmerman, President A. J. Evans and Counselor Wm. F. Gurney, with the benediction by High Priest A. R. Anderson.
The family
John Roberts’s life runs the full length of the migration: converted in 1849, the year the first chapel opened at Llanelli; emigrated in 1863 on the last of the great sailing companies; and sent back in 1871 as a missionary to the country he had left. The archive records both journeys, out and back. See the full timeline →
One correction. The account supplied to this archive says Charles Dickens was a passenger on the Amazon. He was not: he visited the ship in the Thames before she sailed, as his own words above make plain, and the archive states it that way throughout.
Records also differ on three points. The marriage is dated 5 January 1847 in the family account and “in the year 1848” in John’s funeral notice, while Adelaide’s gives 1847. The Amazon’s arrival is 18 July 1863 in the family account and 20 July in Church History records for some passengers. And the family account says nine of the eleven children lived to adulthood, while John’s funeral notice records all living except one, and Adelaide’s that her husband and two sons had gone before her. The passenger total of about 890 is approximate. One of the funeral clippings arrived filed as “Adelia Jones”, but its text is the funeral of Adelaide Ford Roberts.