Shallow Graves

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As one reads through the travels and trials of the Saints on the Mormon Trail its not uncommon to read the term shallow graves. A shallow grave was also termed what by the pioneers?

a.                   A wagon rut grave

b.                  An oxen hoof grave

c.                   A divet grave

d.                  A chain link grave

Yesterday’s answer:

A.                    She settled in a town comprised of all people from Denmark

From the life of Maren Thomasen Andersen:   Maren was born in Werring, Denmark. Little is known of her childhood. She married Mogen Pedersen but there are no dates of their marriage or of his death. They became the parents of two children, a boy and a girl.

Maren joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when she was sixty-three years old, September 22, 1862 in Denmark. Her daughter, Jacobine Kirstine, had married and emigrated to Utah with her husband and two daughters. Maren emigrated to Utah in 1863. She sailed from Liverpool, England, May 8, 1863, on the “B. S. Kimball.” She arrived in the Salt Lake Valley by wagon the fall of 1863. The Company she traveled with is not known.

In 1864, she traveled with her daughter and her family into the Bear Lake Valley. They settled in Ovid, a community made up of mostly people from Denmark. That is probably the reason Maren never learned to speak the English language.

In the spring of 1865, her daughter’s husband passed away. Jacobine Kirstine remarried but passed away the following year. Maren found herself alone in a strange land. She had nothing in the way of worldly goods. Because she could not speak English she felt that others should raise her two grandchildren. She was always mindful of them when they needed comfort and were hungry. She was a loving and caring woman to her grandchildren and all who knew her. She was always busy knitting and sewing for her grandchildren.

When her eldest granddaughter married, her husband, William Skinner, built a room on their house for Maren. There she lived until 1889 when she passed away at the age of ninety years.

International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude, (Publishers Press, 1998), 1: 70.