The debate
Abel Evans was born in Carmarthenshire in the early 1810s, and he first appears in the record as an opponent. The Latter-day Saint message had reached the Merthyr Tydfil coalfield through William Henshaw, a Cornishman sent from Wolverhampton by Lorenzo Snow, and the non-conformist chapels answered it in the way Welsh chapels answered anything: by argument, in public, at length.
Abel Evans was one of the debaters engaged to argue against the new church. Before the end of the second debate he found that he could no longer sustain the arguments of the non-conformists. He went from the debate to the river, and was baptised on 10 February 1844 by the man whose doctrine he had been briefed to demolish.
He is believed to be the second person baptised by divine authority in Wales.
Six years on the road
From that time forth he served as a travelling missionary, and by every account an extremely effective one, working across both South and North Wales for about six years. Andrew Jenson’s biographical notice records that he “laboured with great success” and calls him a man of strong faith, “the Lord working many miracles through his instrumentality, many being healed of their maladies through his faith and prayers, among others several cases of cancer and cholera”.
That is a claim of a particular kind, and the archive presents it as what it is: the judgement of a nineteenth-century Church biographer, recorded in the language of his own community. What can be traced independently is where he went and whom he baptised — and in Merionethshire the names are ones this archive knows well.
Whom he baptised
Everyone in the archive whose baptism is attributed to Abel Evans. Each name is a record of its own.
At Hen Felin, Rhyd y Sarn, on 21 June 1846, he stood in the water to baptise the Peters family. Lowry stepped forward first; David, deciding that a man should always be first, walked into the river in the clothes he was standing in. They became the second and third people baptised in that part of North Wales — the first being David Roberts. Abel Evans is the reason all three names are in this archive.
A meeting on the ship
He left Wales to join the main body of the Saints in the Rocky Mountains, and on the ship he met Mary Jones, a convert from Llangynog, Carmarthenshire. They were married at St Louis. He was thirty-eight and she was twenty-three.
They settled at Lehi, about thirty miles south of Salt Lake City — the same town the John Roberts family of Dolgellau would come to thirteen years later. Both men had crossed an ocean to reach a valley, and both are buried within a few miles of the parish they left.
Not the same Mary Jones. The girl who walked to Bala for a Bible in 1800, whose story is told on the history page, was Mary Jones of Llanfihangel-y-Pennant. Abel Evans’s wife was Mary Jones of Llangynog. The name was among the most common in Wales, and the archive keeps them firmly apart.
Sent back
At the April conference of 1865 he was called on a mission to his native country — the second time he would cross the Atlantic, this time in the other direction and at over fifty. He became President of the Welsh District and diligently visited the branches. Caleb Parry, who had emigrated in 1856 and returned to Wales in 1865, served as his counsellor in the Welsh conference from November 1866.
Eighteen months into that mission he was helping a company of Welsh converts prepare to sail for America when he contracted a serious illness and died. He never went home. He left three widows and fifteen children at Lehi.
The Millennial Star of November 1892 printed a Roll of Honour of missionaries who had died in the field around the world. Abel Evans is on it.
Most of the people in this archive are here because they left. Abel Evans is here because he stayed, walked, and kept coming back. He is the link between the coalfield where the message landed and the upland parishes it reached; between Dan Jones’s printing and the actual river baptisms in Merionethshire; and between a chapel debate in 1844 and three families in Utah. Follow almost any Merionethshire record in this archive back far enough and you arrive at a man standing in cold water.
The baptism on 10 February 1844 by William Henshaw, the mission call of April 1865, the presidency of the Welsh District and the death in the field are all documented, and he appears by name in the Millennial Star Roll of Honour of November 1892 and in the Church History Biographical Database.
Records differ — on three points. His birth is given as 17 June 1812 in the record this archive holds and as 24 June 1813 in Andrew Jenson’s biographical notice; the Church History database indexes him under 1812. His emigration is dated 1850 by Jenson and by the Church’s own account of the elders who died on mission, but Church History places him in the William Morgan wagon company of 1852; the two are not reconcilable without a passenger list, and both are shown. And his American home is given as Lehi in most accounts but as Salt Lake City in one. The claim that he was the second person baptised in Wales is itself recorded as a belief — “is believed to be” — not as a settled fact.
Sources
- Andrew Jenson’s biographical notice of Abel Evans, “one of the Latter-day Saint Elders who died while filling a foreign mission”.
- Millennial Star, November 1892 — Roll of Honour of missionaries who died in the field.
- Church History Biographical Database, entry for Abel Evans; and the William Morgan Company roster, 1852.
- The Church’s account of elders buried in British graveyards, for the debate, the mission call of April 1865 and the presidency of the Welsh District.
- Welsh Mission material published by the BYU Religious Studies Center on the early Welsh press, for the debate and the emigration of 1850.
- Missionary journals of Wales, 1864–1903, for Caleb Parry’s service as his counsellor.
- Family histories of the Peters and Eames families of Merionethshire, for the baptisms of 1846 and 1847.
His burial place at Merthyr Tydfil, the ship of his 1850 or 1852 crossing, and the names of his three wives and fifteen children are not yet established here.