Ann Chamberlin - Clogs and Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, and the Search for Zion

IN MAY OF 1983, I carried a portable cassette recorder over the shaky plywood bridge that had been thrown across Salt Lake Citys flooded State Street. I was on my way, at my uncle Ralph Noel Mauds insistence, between bus connections to interview my great-aunts who lived in Rose Park. That year I interviewed my grandmother and all six of my mothers aunts who had made it to Utah. I attended every one of their parties, which were frequent and much lovedexcept by those of us of more recent generations trying to negotiate a Zion very different from the one those women imagined when they were girls in England.

Not one of the sisters ever fell away from the faith their mother taught them, and each endured to the end. How Great-grandma managed is one of the mysteries of this tale the rest of us struggle to unravel. Even God, the scriptures tell us, lost a third of the host of heaven.

Their adopted home in Utah found them as foreign as they found it; it did not readily embrace them. And so the Whitaker sistersmy great-aunts and my grandmotherclung to each other. Although at great sacrifice they had left the safety of home and family for something greater, and although social events had been among the deepest parts of their religious upbringing, they never found close friends outside the family group in Salt Lake City.

My grandmother and her seven sisters grew up in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, in Dickensian conditions, most of the girls having to leave school at twelve to begin work in the woolen mills. WorldWar I claimed many of the young men they might have married, but in the end they all fulfilled their parents dream to emigrate to Zion. Mormon prophets for generations have sent out missionaries, fishing for converts. Converts, once attracted, were told to gather to Zion, in the shadow of the everlasting hills. Here was a more perfect society, people who were all fellow believers. Unlike immigrants to the U.S. from other ethnic groups who knew they would have language and cultural barriers to overcome, the women of my family thought they would at last be coming home.

In England, they had been poor, desperately poor. Their father, Ralph Robinson Whitaker, had been blinded at aged three and tuned pianos for a living. Thered been so many of them, and never the protecting brother. Theyd had little education. And yet, for me as a child, listening to the roll of their stories around me, England in the past always seemed the promised land. I was Mormon? Every imperfect person around me was Mormon. Being English, belonging to that familythat was how I was truly blessed. Until I was not, until I was a teenager, and saw that I was out of the loop and ashamed of my poor, alien roots.

The mother of these girlsMary Jane Jones, born in Swansea, Wales, in 1870was the one to convert, having first met missionaries from Utah in Russell Square in London. Hers, along with that of the blind man she married, is the primeval story.

She gave birth to eight daughters between 1897 and 1910: