Married John Hopwood Bleazard
Married Isaac Hill 27 October 1852 in Salt Lake City
Mary Jane-Elizabeth-William Alonzo-Dixie
Died 5 February 1896
Buried in St. Charles
1850 Census
1860 Census
1870 Census
The following was written by Stella Johnson Mackelprang. After Stella's history you'll find Mary Jane's
testimony in court following her first husband's death. This is the
only time we have her own words. Joan carefully transcribed her
testimony; only Mary Jane's answers are there, not the questions she was
asked. Thank you, Joan, for all your help and interesting information.Joan also thinks there are some errors in Stella's history. She thinks Mary Jane Miller and Sarah Searcy both came to Utah with the Wilford Woodruff company of 1850 and that they traveled with John Hopwood Bleazard. Mary Jane testified in court that her second child, a son who died, was born in Salt Lake while she was still married to JHB. If anyone knows more about this, both Joan and I would love to hear it.
The sketch to the right may be Mary Jane. If you look on Isaac's page, you'll see one done of someone who might be Isaac at the same time. The original has both people together.
At the end there is another history of Mary Jane from Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude. It is very similar to the first history, although the second is much shorter.
I deeply appreciate the information I have received in writing this Life History of Mary Jane Miller and wish to extend my gratitude to the following named people for this help:
Grandfather Hill’s old diary – written by himself
My mother, Elizabeth Hill (C) Johnson
My two brothers, Melvin and William Cook
My two sisters, Catherine J. Strong and Ida J. Litster
Also my cousin Geneva Wilding, granddaughter of Sylvia Hill Oviatt.
Stella Johnson Mackelprang
Pearl Cook Day, typist
Mary Jane Miller, daughter of James Miller and Sarah Searcy (or Surcey) was born 9 January 1832 at Beards, Montgomery County, Illinois. She was twelve years old when she embraced The Gospel of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It is believed that her father James Miller died at Nauvoo, Illinois, while working on the Nauvoo Temple. (Isaac Hill’s old diary mentions a James Miller who died at Nauvoo, Illinois, 12 March 1840, but does not explain who he was). The James Miller family (Mary Jane’s father’s family) were living in Nauvoo at that time.
Mary Jane and her mother Sarah Searcy (or Surcey) Miller (a widow) were married in polygamy to John H. Blazzard, 30 March 1846 at Winter Quarters. President Brigham Young performed the marriage ceremony with Willard Richards and Wilford Woodruff as witnesses. From this marriage of Mary Jane and John H. Blazzard, two daughters, Sarah and Mary Ann, were born. Mary Ann died when about the age of two years, from the effects of ill-treatment she received from her father.
Mary Jane became infuriated because of her husband’s outrageous temper and of his mistreatment of her and her children and his cruelty to her child who had died from the effects of his ill-treatment. She also learned of how he had cheated a poor widow out of what little property she did have and she felt she just could not put up with his disgraceful conduct any longer, so she left him, taking her remaining child with her. She received a divorce from him on 31 January 1851.
She with her child Sarah and her Mother and her children, along with other members of the Saints, left Illinois in 1848 with the Captain Hooper Company. She walked all the way across the plains and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley with this company.
On 27th October 1852, Mary Jane married Isaac Hill in polygamy with her sister Martha who had married this same man, a widower, the year before on October 29, 1851. They were both sealed to him in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City, Utah, 21 April 1857. Two children Caroline, born 16 January 1854, and John, born 29 November 1855 were born from this union of Isaac and Martha.
On 21 April 1851, Isaac was chosen first Counselor to Bishop Niels Jensen in the Second Ward of what was then Salt Lake Stake, but is now the Liberty Stake, and 28 December 1854, he was ordained Bishop of this ward and served in that capacity for ten years. He was the second bishop of this ward.
During the time that Mary Jane’s husband Isaac served in the Bishopric of this ward, she along with several other women of the LDS Church were chosen and set apart by President Brigham Young to serve as Nurses in Israel and in this capacity she served until her death.
On 9 April 1857, Isaac received a call to go on a mission to Canada and received a leave of absence from his duties as Bishop during his absence; and on 25 April, he in company with 73 other Elders left for this mission and he returned 21 June 1858. In August 1858 his wife Martha left home, taking her children with her and went to her mother’s. 17 September 1858 Isaac gave her a divorce as he said she had been untrue to him during his absence while on his mission.
In the year of 1862 - month and date ? - Isaac was married an sealed to Arkartha Rasmussen in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. To them one child, a boy named Charles, was born 17 September 1863.
Mary Jane and her husband Isaac had six children born to them while they were living in Salt Lake City, Utah, and were as follows:
Elizabeth born 22 September 1853
Jacob Brigham born 25 June 1855
Isaac born 6 August 1858
Eliza Homer born 3 January 1860
Samuel Robert born 11 January 1862
Margaret Ella born 21 January 1864
(Jacob Brigham died 10 September 1856)
Like most pioneer families of that time, Isaac’s family had to share the trials (the cricket plague and other hardships) incident to that time with the other families of the community.
As he was the Bishop’s counselor for three years and then Bishop for ten years, he had to spend a great deal of his time with the affairs of the ward and also the one year he spent in the mission field in Canada. Mary Jane had to work very hard at Carding, Spinning and Nursing and in every honorable way she could in order to provide a living for the family. What spare time Isaac did have, he worked very hard both at blacksmithing and brick making to earn money with which to help support the family.
In September 1864, Mary Jane and her husband Isaac received a call from President Brigham Young to go and help settle the Bear Lake region in Idaho. So together with their children and her daughter Sarah (daughter of J. H. Blazzard) and Martha’s two children Caroline and John, who had by this time been left to the care and protection of their father, and also his wife Amelia and their son Charles, left for this new section of the country.
The trials and hardships they had to endure while living in Salt Lake City were nothing in comparison with what they met up with in this new territory. They went to St. Charles, Idaho, when they first arrived there. Isaac expected as soon as they got settled, to go to Cash Valley to get a load of flour and other fool stuff and provisions for their winter use. But before he could get affairs settled so he could leave on this trip there came such a heavy snow storm and the snow was so deep they were snowed in with no way of getting out with a team and wagon.
There they were with a terrible winter facing them with no flour for bread and very little of anything else to eat and not much clothing suitable for winter wear. Isaac had brought some wheat with them expecting to use it for seed the next spring but they had to use it to eat instead. However, they had no way of getting it ground outside of grinding it on a coffee mill. Some of it they boiled and ate with milk, but they had no sugar or anything else with which to sweeten it.
Isaac and the young boys had only time enough to get the logs hauled and to build one room before the heavy snow fell, and it was so deep that they were unable to haul more logs with which to build more rooms. On account of there being so many members in the family there was not room enough in the one log room for beds for them all to sleep on, so the wagon box with the bows and cover over the top of it was pressed into service as an extra bedroom. This was placed outside the house by the door and Elizabeth and Caroline slept in one end of it and the two boys Isaac and John slept in the other end.
The weather grew so cold that the temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero. An old carpet was placed over the top of the bedding as an extra protection to the occupants of the bed against the cold weather. But as there were so many sleeping in the bed and so close together they managed to sleep quite warm and comfortable and didn’t suffer too much from the cold winter.
Isaac’s wife, Amelia, and her young son Charles who had accompanied him and Mary Jane and the rest of the family stayed with them for a short time, but after finding how crowded their living conditions were in the one little log room and what dire circumstances they had facing them with so little to eat and wear and no prospects of conditions getting any better that winter, she tried to persuade Isaac to leave Mary Jane and the rest of the family and go away with her. This he refused to do and she became so angry at his refusal to go with her, she ran away with another man taking her child with her. Mary Jane then had her husband to herself without having to share him with another woman.
When the family first arrived at St. Charles there was a lot of tall wild grass growing down on the lake bottom and as it yet had not started to snow. Isaac and the boys cut and stacked enough of this wild grass to make two large stacks and he thought this would be enough to feed their two horses and two milk cows that winter. Some campers, however, came along and camped too close to the stacks and sparks from their camp-fire caught in the stacks and burned them to the ground. The heavy snow came before Isaac and the boys could get any more cut. So the children, Isaac and John, Elizabeth, and Caroline, had to wade through the deep snow to gather what wild grass they could find that had not been covered with the snow to feed the horses and cows to keep them from starving. On the days they were not hunting for wild grass they would have to hunt for willows and sticks for fire wood.
About February when the lake (Bear Lake) was frozen over, two men from the east came to the new territory and cut holes in the ice and fished and caught a lot of fish. As Isaac and Mary Jane and their families were among the first settlers there they had never seen this method of fishing before. But after learning how it was done Mary Jane would go down on the lake nearly every day and fish and catch enough for the family to eat. She had this job to do as the children were busy hunting wild grass and fire wood, and as Isaac had been subjected to severe spells of rheumatism and arthritis, for years he could not stand the exposure of the cold and being on the ice.
The next summer there came another cricket (or grasshopper) plague similar to the one that had infested Salt Lake City while they were living there and what few crops Isaac and the boys did get planted were nearly all destroyed by these pests. They did manage though to save some dry peas and they had two or three sacks of frost-bitten turnips that had been given to them. These made them all sick when they cooked and ate them but even though they did make them sick they had to eat them anyway.
They didn’t have much better prospects that next winter as far as the food situation was concerned than they had the previous winter as the grasshoppers had destroyed what few crops they had planted and Isaac was afflicted so much with another spell of rheumatism during that summer that he was unable to make the trip to Cash Valley he had planned on doing to get a load of flour and other provisions for their winter use, just as he had been prevented on doing the winter before on account of the heavy snow fall.
He and the boys, however, did manage to go down on the lake bottoms and cut wild grass again, but this time they hauled it home and stacked it so they had feed for their horses and cows to eat without the children having to gather it and they did have milk and butter to use. Then as soon as the lake was frozen over, they cut holes in the ice and fished. The children had the fishing to do this winter though as Mary Jane was pregnant again. Her son Joseph was born in March and she was so sick all during her pregnancy she was unable to help with the fishing. Isaac and the boys managed to get enough logs hauled and to build another room so the children did not have to sleep outside in the wagon-box again that winter.
There were four more children born to Mary Jane and Isaac while they were living in St. Charles and were as follows:
Joseph Young, born 17 March 1866
Sylvia Annie, born 14 May 1868
Emaline Martha, born 6 April 1870
Hyrum Smith, born 6 August 1873
When Hyrum was one year old, they moved six miles south to Fish Haven, Idaho, where they bought a small farm and Isaac and the boys built a two room log house to live in.
Isaac had been afflicted with rheumatism and arthritis for many years and finally became so lame he had to walk with a cane. However he used to walk one mile to George Town on "Fast Days" to bear his testimony to the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He died 25 June 1879 at Fish Haven, Idaho, and was taken to St. Charles for burial.
Mary Jane’s daughter, Sarah (daughter of J. H. Blazzard) was married to Randolph H. Steward to Fish Haven, Idaho. He was called 4 March 1870 by Apostle Charles C. Rich, to superintend the colonizing of a new settlement just over the state line, in the Crawford mountains of Rich County, Utah. He and his wife Sarah went there to make their home. He was sustained and ordained the first Bishop of the Ward, that was organized in this new community. He served in this capacity for ten years, and it was in his honor the town of Randolph received its name.
Mary Jane and Isaac’s son, Isaac married Rebecca Tremellin and they settled in St. Charles, Idaho, where they lived for many years. Mary Jane’s daughter Margret married Thomas Smith of Fish Haven and they bought a farm there and lived there the rest of their lives. Her daughter, Elizabeth married Phineas Cook of St. Charles, Idaho. He, however, was accidentally shot and killed instantly just seven years after their marriage. Two years after her husband’s death, she was married to Ole Chriss Johnson of Fish Haven, Idaho. Samuel R. married Christie Reid, and Eliza H. married William Howard (a polygamist).
In the year of 1880, (the following year after her husband’s death (Isaac) Mary Jane, together with her two youngest daughters Sylvia A. and Emaline M. and her youngest son, Hyrum S. (these children as yet were still unmarried), and also her son Samuel R. and his wife Christie and their family, Sarah and her husband Randolph Stewart and their family, Eliza H. and William Howard and their children, and his other two wives Mary and Nonie and their families; and also John L. Brasher and his family accepted the call from President Brigham Young to go and help settle the section of Utah that is now known as Castle Valley. Mary Jane’s son Joseph Y. did not come at this time but came four years later with Elizabeth and Chriss and their family.
The company of 1880 left Bear Lake region in the spring of the year and traveled by ox-teams and wagons to Huntington, Utah, and arrived there in July. Mary Jane bought two different lots within the Huntington town site, but she did not like it there. She wanted a farm, so she bought one up Huntington Canyon and had a two-room dug-out built there for her and her two daughters, Sylvia and Emaline and her son Hyrum. (This dug-out is still in use 1964 as a fruit cellar by the present owner, Dranon Seeley).
Her son Samuel homesteaded a farm a few miles farther up the canyon from her and built a two- room log house on it, and he and his family lived there for a few years. However, he never did secure the deeds to his farm and so lost his rights to it. In 1903 when the Manti National Forest was set aside by President Theodore Roosevelt the "Samuel Hill farm" was taken over as a "Ranger Station" and was used as such for many years.
Elizabeth and her husband and family arrived in Huntington, Utah, 3 July 884 and settled there and continued to do so the rest of their lives. He died 28 January 1925. She died 4 March 1936. Both were buried in the Huntington cemetery.
Mary Jane with the help of Hyrum, and Joseph, after his arrival there, tried running her farm up Huntington canyon for a few years , but it was so far from town and in the spring of the year the river which they had to cross became so high from the melting snow they were unable to cross it for weeks at a time. So, she sold her farm to a man by the name of Isaac Brockbank, who bought it for his son John. She then bought a farm about one-half mile west of the Huntington town-site, and joining the farm her daughter Elizabeth and husband had bought, and had a two- room house (one log room and one rock) built on a small hill on the south-west portion of her farm.
After Samuel lost his farm he had homesteaded, but failed to prove up on, he and his family returned to Fish Haven, Idaho, and Joseph returned with them. From Fish Haven, Samuel and family moved to Big Piney, Wyoming. He died there in 1902. Joseph never did marry, but he went to the Teton Basin and homesteaded a farm and died there in 1929. Mary Jane and Hyrum stayed in Huntington until the spring of 1982. She then decided she wanted to go back to Fish Haven, Idaho, and this she did and Hyrum with with her. They took the train part way and finished the trip by stage coach arriving there 8 June 1892. She sold her farm to Elizabeth and her husband, who bought it for her son William Alonzo.
By this time her two daughters, Sylvia A. and Emaline M. had both married. Sylvia married Beeman L. Ovaitt and they went to Cleveland to live, where they lived for many years and then moved to Elmo, a small town a short distance from Cleveland and lived there the remainder of their lives. Emaline married David A. Johnson and they went to Moab, Utah, to live and died there.
Sarah and Randolph Stewart who came to Huntington the same time her mother did, stayed there for awhile and they too went to Moab to live and remained there the rest of their lives.
After returning to Fish Haven, Idaho, Mary Jane bought a farm joining the one her daughter Margret and her husband owned. Her son Hyrum built a two room house for her there and cared for her until she died. He married Sarah Elizabeth Thompson and they went to the Teton Basin to life.Up until the last few years of her life Mary Jane had been a strong healthy woman. She was of a short chubby build and was quite good looking with beautiful blue eyes and soft wavy brown hair, that her grandchildren dearly loved to comb. She had a sweet kind and loving disposition and such a pleasant look on her countenance. She was always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone in need and was dearly loved by all who knew her.
As long as she was able to do so, she was always a very industrious and hard-working woman, carding, spinning and knitting as well as sewing and making the clothing for the members of her family to wear. She also worked very hard with the other responsibilities of the home which consisted of cooking, washing on the wash-board, as there were no washing machines in those days, and in making all the soap they had to use, as well as helping with the farm work and milking cows and working the in garden. She too, was an active mid-wife as well as a doctor woman. She was very proficient in caring for the sick and the wounded and in setting broken bones, etc.
She had what was called a "Peep stone" that had been given her by a girl friend who had found it when they were crossing the plains together and by some unusual "intuition" she, by holding it in her hand and placing her finger-tips on it, she was enabled to see many amazing things in it that would help people for good. Some people though, said it was through the power of the evil on she was enabled to see these things. But as she always used it for a good purpose, she felt that she was justified in using it. However, she was finally told by the Church Authorities not to use it any more and so she threw it away. It was later found by one of the members of the family and was kept in the family for years as a keepsake. However, by her throwing it away this did not stop her from "seeing things" and always for a good purpose and she felt that it was gift from Heavenly Father that enabled her to see these things and not by the use of the "Peep-stone." (See 1 Corinthians 12:1-13.)
She was always a true, faithful and devout Latter-day Saint and always true to the religion she had embraced and always took an active part in the church organizations, especially the Relief Society.
She finally contracted the dreadful disease Diabetes, and as a result she lost many pounds in weight and her eye-sight became so impaired she almost lost it entirely and she suffered a great deal before she passed on. She lived until February 5, 1896, when her death occurred in her little two-room home at Fish Haven, Idaho, and was taken to St. Charles, Idaho for burial and was laid to rest by the side of her husband, Isaac Hill.
Hers had been a hard, useful and wonderful life, and she strove always to do her part in making it a worthy one. Her son, Isaac, was also buried in this same cemetery beside his wife, Rebecca, and their son Clarence who died before he was married. Martha’s son John was also buried there. Her son Hyrum married Sarah Elizabeth Thompson and they went to the Teton Basin to live.
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Court testimony of Mary Jane:
Mary Jane Miller (Blazzard) Hill was 88 years old when she spoke as an Intervener at the Third Judicial Court District action beginning in 1890 and relating to John Hopwood Bleazard's Will.
Mary Jane mentions the marriage of John and Sarah Searcy Miller and says they had six children. She then said, "Thomas was the last one. He is one of the Plaintiffs, was born in Salt Lake. He was born in August. He is about thirty-two, I ain't sure...They were all their children . . . and they were living together as husband and wife. They (John and Sarah Searcy) ceased living together a little while before Thomas was born . . .
"I am acquainted with John (Searcy) Blazzard. I lived with him nineteen years . . . I can state how he got his injury. Well, he got up on a little stool by the side of the table when he was about thirteen or fourteen months old, just big enough to climb up and his father was in a raging tantrum. He was awfully high tempered and he ran through the house and the stool was a little in his road, as he went past there was a chair or something sitting between them, and he spoke to this little child, he said, 'Get down from there, John!' and, of course, the little child didn't pay any attention to it, and he put his shoe under the stool and throwed it clear up, and the child, it struck the child's head against the ceiling, the board ceiling in the house. He came down and lit on his head; for a while we thought he was dead. His neck was broken. When he came out of that he didn't know anything - just seemed for three or four months he didn't know a thing, looked up like he was catching at something, and he never got any mind afterward - no sense to know anything much... He was older than Mrs. Steers (Mariam). . . He cannot transact any business, he don't know the value of nothing...He cannot read or write if he does anything...in two years he was staying with me for awhile. If you put him to work he is apt to forget it and he would lay down and not know what he was doing.
"I did not know John Blazzard before he married my mother. . . I went out to work at a place and while I was gone they was married, and then he came back for me. I was not present at their marriage at all. I knew who married them by what my mother told me, not of my own knowledge.
"I was married to John H. Blazzard myself at Winter Quarters. It was about . . . March or April, I thought it was April I never paid any attention to it, only that it was in the spring of the year. . . I cannot deny or assert that in March 1848, about six o'clock in the evening in Winter Quarters that Brigham Young, in the presence of Willard Richards and Wilford Woodruff, as witnesses, married me and my mother to John H. Blazzard at the same time.
". . . now I tell you that I had never been married before I married there. I was fourteen years old then. . . Uncle John Smith they called him, was the one who said my ceremony with Blazzard. Brigham Young was not there when that was done; he came here to the mountains with the pioneers, the day I was married. My mother was not married to Blazzard when I first married him. She lived with him at the same time. There was no ceremony at the same time. We did not stand up together. I was married more than once to Blazzard. When Brigham Young came back he had the ceremony over again. I don't remember when it was. The time that Smith married me was before that. I cannot remember whether Brigham Young married my mother to Blazzard at the same time he married me to Blazzard...The Smith who first married me to Blazzard was an old man, an Uncle of Joseph and Hyrum. I think they used to call him Uncle John Smith. Brigham Young married me to Blazzard before we left Winter Quarters. It was when he came back and I don't know the date. I don't know how long it was after Smith married me. I never have seen a record of that marriage. I know when they put the record down when I was married; of course I seen them do the writing, I supposed that was what they were doing . . . I know Willard Richards was one of the witnesses because we went to his house. I was church divorced from Blazzard. I believe my mother was divorced in the same way on the same day. . . I can't tell whether it was on the 30th day of June 1881 (?) or not... It seems to me that she married Blazzard after that. I don't remember whether she married him again and then was divorced from him by the church. . .I understood by her that she married him again. I don't know that she was divorced again in 1857 from him by the church about the time they separated or not.
"I remember their separation. They would get a rumpus up once in a while and live apart and then come back. I lived with Blazzard as his wife five years, I believe. I had two children by him. One of them is dead. I don't know the year that the first child was born (Sarah Ann) I was sixteen when she was born. The first child is alive. She is 41 or more. She is one year older than this Mrs. Steers, about a year younger than John (Searcy).
"...Blazzard and myself lived in the 18th Ward after we came to Salt Lake. The same house where my mother lived. The first child was born in Missouri. The second child was born here. . . He was living with both of us as his wives there in the same house.
"...My mother went to Washington after she separated from John H. Blazzard. She stayed in Salt Lake I think a couple of years, maybe longer. I guess John (Searcy) was 10 or 11 when the family moved away to Washington. I guess all the other children of my mother by John H. Blazzard can read and write- I don't know what John (Searcy) does down there. . . . From 1859 or 1860 when they went away from here I never saw him until about two years ago. . . I do not know anything about what Thomas does. I do not know what James is doing...John came to me in September and went away in the winter. A month or two. I was living in Huntington, Emery County then. . . I had a farm there. I got John to cut me some corn one day and he laid down and went to sleep. He can't keep his mind long enough to keep anything . . . He could not count, I used to try to get him to count when he was a little fellow but he never knowed enough.
"The youngest child that my mother had by her marriage to Blazzard was Thomas. I don't know whether he was born in 1857 or not. They were not living together when he was born any how, they had separated. Had been separated for awhile . . .
"My last child with Blazzard was born a year after we came into the valley. . . I believe it was 1850 when we came in. I had left him when my last child was born. My mother had left him too. Me and mother was living together after we left him. I believe we left him at the same time, but I ain't sure. I came and lived with mother.
"I was there when my last child was born. My mother and myself were both living in the same house with Blazzard as his wives, when that child was begetting. I lived with my mother until I left entirely. I did not live with Blazzard when my last child was born, we separated before.
"Of the three children by Blazzard's first wife, the girl married, and the two boys lived with us.
"I testified that John H. Blazzard had a wife before he married my mother. I believe her name was Betsy Poole. I never was acquainted with her. I guess it was his wife, he lived with her - as I understood before he married or commenced living with my mother. He didn't have any children by that woman. . . It was his first wife that had the three children, before he married Mrs. Poole. Her maiden name was Nowall. . . I never was acquainted with her. One was Elijah … one was Robert, the next was …Ann . . . I knew them all. They were living in Nauvoo. They came into the valley with me. Two of them - one of them died back there, she died after we left Nauvoo. He (JHB) came out here and left one of his first wife's children back there. I don't know how old she was then, she had a couple of children. . . These children of Blazzard's by his wife Nowell (Newell) came to live with Sarah Blazzard at the time she married him.
"The first thing he (JHB) said to me was he asked me how I liked my new father, that was in a kind of joking way, that is all I remember particular about it.
"Everybody in the town knew about the marriage. I have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and still continue to try to be. It has been a practice and a custom of the church where marriages has been solemnized between two parties for the purpose of cementing it for eternity, to go through another ceremony of marriage. It is called the celestial marriage. Certain authorities had that privilege of doing it and others didn't. That was the practice at the time I married at Winter Quarters. Brother Brigham Young assumed to exercise that authority at that time to celebrate what was celestial marriage. My marriage was that to Blazzard, and the first (civil) marriage was solemnized by a man by the name of Smith. Afterwards when Brigham Young came back, he had been out here to the mountains with a pioneer company .. . . he performed the sealing ceremony. . . I heard of a good many people who had been married according to laws of the country, going through a second marriage of that kind . . . I was fourteen in January and this marriage was in March. . . I separated from Blazzard before my second child was born.
"There was trouble between Blazzard and my mother all the time. On that account and other troubles. My mother gave her consent to my marriage because she had to, I guess. She didn't want to I don't suppose. My first child was born in Holt County, Missouri about a year and a half after the ceremony was performed between myself and John H. Blazzard October of the following year. My next child was born in Salt Lake. The date of his birth was the 30th of September, three years after the other. I don't know whether it was one or two years after we came to the Territory, we came in October, and it was in September when he was born three years I guess.
"My mother consented to my marriage with Blazzard, that was the order them days. I don't know as I ever heard her complain before I was married. I don't know as I ever heard of anyone going through the sealing ceremony prior to mine. They always held that there was only one at a time was authorized to perform that ceremony. That was our counsel or religion I don't know who told me. I don't know as any one of the Apostles could do it, unless he was appointed. I never knew or saw Mrs. Nowell. I did not know nor ever saw Betsy Poole. I suppose if they had not been dead I should have . . . seen them around.
"My mother never told me anything particular about her marriage, only how they got acquainted. She said he (JHB) came and seen her chopping wood and wanted to know if she didn't want to get married and have somebody do her work for her. He said he was alone and had nobody to do for him. That was their first conversation. She said she married him to have a home. They got married right off as quick as they could. . . I don't know as she told me where they were married. I think it was Hyrum Smith that married them as near as I can keep it in my memory. She told me something about the man who married (them) pronouncing blessings upon them and hoping that they would get along good. . .
"My mother and John H. Blazzard were living together as man and wife a year before the prophet was assassinated. Betsy Poole has children by Mr. Poole, she did not have any by Blazzard. Just one of the children came here that I know of. . ."
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Mary Jane Miller was born in 1832 in Illinois. Mary Jane embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ with her family when she was twelve years of age and was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is believed that her father, James Miller, died at Nauvoo, Illinois, while working on the temple.
Mary Jane and her mother Sarah Searcy were married in polygamy to John H. Blazzard (30 March 1848) , and Mary Jane bore two children. Mary Jane was later granted a divorce in 1851.
Mary Jane, her daughter Sarah, and her mother left Illinois in 1848, and walked across the Plains in the Captain Hopper Company.
Mary Jane and her sister Martha, married Isaac Hill in polygamy on 27 October 1852. Their husband was called as a bishop's councilor and then as bishop. During the time he served in the bishopric, Mary Jane and several other women were called and set apart to serve as nurses by President Brigham Young; a calling she served until her death.
In September 1864, Mary Jane and her husband Isaac, received a call from President Young to go and help settle the Bear Lake region of Idaho. They settled first in St Charles and then in Fish Haven, Idaho. The first winter was extremely difficult, they got snowed in and couldn't get supplies. They had very little food and
warm clothing, and the winter was bitter cold. Mary Jane learned to ice fish on Bear Lake, to help supplement their food supply. The second winter was also harsh. Their food supply was again meager because of the cricket plague during the summer, however, they were able to build an adequate shelter to protect them from the cold and snow.
Mary Jane's husband, Isaac, died in June of 1879, and one year later, in 1880, Mary Jane and her family accepted a call to go to Castle Valley. They left in the spring and arrived in Huntington in July. She and her son, Hyrum, farmed in Huntington Canyon and nearby, until 1892, when they returned to Fish Haven,
Idaho, where she remained until her death on 5 February 1896, after being a widow for over seventeen years. She was buried in St. Charles, Idaho, beside her husband.
Mary Jane was a true, faithful and devoted Latter-day Saint. She was truly a wonderful pioneer woman of great faith and fortitude, honored by all.
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