Item Detail
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Smith, Margaret Ann Haskell
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1864-1943
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MSS SC 386
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Biography
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Margaret Ann Haskell was born 6 April 1864 in Pinto, Washington County, Utah to Thales Hastings Haskell and Margaret Johannah Edwards Haskell. She grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She lived in Pinto and attended a one room school house until she was 15, when her family home was washed away in a flood. The family moved to another settlement called Sunset, Arizona and then Montezuma, Colorado where her father was called to be a missionary to the Indians. Margaret attended the St. George Academy for a year with her sister Irene before they rejoined their family now living in Bluff City. They traveled with the Silas S. Smith company to Bluff and it was on this journey that Margaret met her husband-to-be Jesse J. Smith. On 6 April 1884 on her twentieth birthday she married Jesse and shortly after they traveled to Manassa, Colorado. Margaret used her frontier skills to create a home for her family and on 7 April 1885 had her first child Jesse Haskell Smith. The family lived in Manassa for 18 years during which time Jesse was called on an LDS mission to the eastern states. During this time Margaret kept up the home and family earning her own money by selling cheese. Thanks to Margarets resourcefulness when her husband returned he found roughly the same amount of money in the bank as he had left two years earlier. The family moved to Big Horn Basin, Wyoming to expand their cattle business. However, on their way their oldest son passed away at age seventeen then three years later in 1905 Margarets husband Jesse passed away. Margaret was industrious and took on the role of house keeper, mother and farm manager and continued to provide for herself even after her children were married and moved away. She was an amazing woman with notably good health and energy, she was an excellent mother of six children and two stillborn babies. She passed away at age seventy-nine on 27 October 1943.
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This manuscript is ninety-eight typewritten pages long. The first fifty-three pages are a biography of her father Thales Hastings Haskell, followed by a four-page biography of her mother Margaret Johannah Edwards Haskell and short biographies on Margarets sisters Maria and Irene. Next is a four-page typewritten biography of Margaret including a list of all her children, their names, birth and death dates. The biography was written by her daughter Rebecca Inez Smith Cheatham in 1962. Margarets biography starts with her birth and relates major life events such as schooling, work, marriage, childrens births and deaths, and her own death. Following Margarets biography there are other short histories of her siblings lives, memories of Thales Hastings Haskell, copies of typewritten notes to Thales by church presidents, a brief three-page ancestry of the Haskell family (describing how the Family first came to America), a three-page bibliography and a three-page index, all typewritten.
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1864-1943