Item Detail
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Little, Mary May Clove
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1886-
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MSS SC 1050
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Autobiography
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Mary May Clove Little was born May 5, 1886 'on the Mammoth,' Garfield County, Utah to Neils Ivor Peterson Clove and Mary Anna Barnhurst Clove. Mary's father died when she was young, and her youngest sister was born later that year. Mary's mother did various jobs to provide for her family: she taught school, grew a garden, rented part of their house to another family, and tried farming. Their Uncle Jim was a great help to them, and they visited relatives often. Then, Mary's mother went to Salt Lake City to have a tumor removed. During the operation, she began to bleed internally, and the doctors thought that she would die. She recovered for a time, but got worse in the fall of 1898. Mary was with her grandmother when she received the news of her mother's death. Earlier she had overheard her grandmother saying that if her mother died 'he [she did not hear the name] wouldn't do anything for her lazy girls.' Mary did not let on that she had heard, 'but resolved to be independent of my relatives as to caring for me and I have kept it.' After her mother's death, Mary lived with one relative after another: she attended school, cared for children, and was often called to nurse a relation during an illness or to help a mother who had just given birth. She lived in Garfield County, Beaver, and Panguitch. After several years, Mary's sister Naty called Mary to help her family move from Mt. Carmel to a ranch that they were renting from the Littles. Of a visit that Mr. and Mrs. James Little made to the ranch, Mary said, 'Little did I dream that they [would] be mine.' While Mary was staying with Naty and her family, 'Bud' James Albert Little came over from Glendale to see her, and they eventually decided to be married. They were married March 26, 1909 in Salt Lake City according to some sources and in St. George according to others. They bought a ranch three miles from Glendale and settled there. Of this time Mary said, 'I was happy having a home of my own.' Mary and James were the parents of seven children: Fern, Kay Clove, Fay, Val Clove, James Clove, Emma, and Niels Clove. After raising all of their children and after James' death, Mary stayed in Glendale and cared for her aging mother-in-law.
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This collection contains a photocopy of Mary's handwritten autobiography. It is 83 pages long, and is fairly easy to read although the photocopy is very light along the right margin of the page. Mary goes into great detail about the events of her childhood, the moves that she made, and the stories that stood out to her. She writes in an unaffected style, with her southern Utah dialect coming out at times. Because she refers to so many relatives, it is sometimes difficult to know who she is talking about. She spends the section entitled 'My Social Work' writing about singing at various functions with another girl and about the church callings that she held, starting with her call to be a Sunday school teacher at age 15. Illness and death were a prevalent part of Mary's family's life, and are a major theme in her autobiography. Mary was born with weak ankles, 'born tired' as she calls it, and she remembers having to crawl through the house as a child because her ankles were too weak for her to walk on. She became an orphan after her parents' premature deaths, and spent much of her time nursing others through sickness. After she was married, people often stopped at their house to stay, and she and James would do the same if a child became ill while they were visiting. Mary also endured two miscarriages and the death of her daughter Fern, who died of appendicitis on Mother's Day. Mary ends the autobiography by describing what her children have done with their lives, and with the words of a song, 'a song I used to sing a picture from lifes other side.'
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1852-1893