This is my Great Grandpa John BLOOMFIELD
Born: 2 May 1831; Bungay, Suffolk, England Son of: John BLOOMFIELD and Martha RICHES (or RICHARDS) Married: 1. Harriet WILKINSON; 16 Nov 1857; Chanceville, Monmouth, New Jersey; 2. Elizabeth Ann BARTON (Ashcroft); 11 Jan 1869; Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT Buried: 7 Jan 1916; Ramah, McKinley, New Mexico COMPILED BY DARYL JAMES 2002, USING VARIOUS SOURCES
John Bloomfield was born May 2, 1831, in Bungay, Suffolk, England, to John Bloomfield Sr. and Martha Riches. John Jr. was the youngest of six children. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with his parents at age 19 in 1850 and was soon ordained a priest. He served as a missionary in England until his immigration to the United States a few years later. He sailed aboard the Thornton from Liverpool to New York City, traveling ahead of his parents, who did not arrive in the United States until 1862.
Once in America, John Jr. made his way to Chanceville, N.J., where he met and married another British immigrant and Mormon convert named Harriet Wilkinson. She had immigrated from England with her parents and siblings and had arrived in New York on Jan. 1, 1856. The couple were married Nov. 16, 1857, when John was 26 and Harriet was 18.
In 1859, John, Harriet, and their first daughter, Ellen Marie, went to Omaha, Neb., to prepare for the journey to Utah. While there, Ellen Marie died and Harriet's father also died, leaving her mother and family.
In 1860, John and Harriet crossed the Plains with the Oscar Stoddard handcart company, walking all of the way. This was the 10th and final handcart company. In "Handcarts to Zion," LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen report that the Stoddard group was the smallest of the handcart companies. It included 124 persons, 21 handcarts and seven wagons with six oxen per wagon. George Q. Cannon promised the members of this company at the start, "If they would be humble and faithful, not one of them should die on the road to the Valley." This was literally fulfilled.
John and Harriet, however, suffered many hardships. They were short on food and water and were always afraid of the Indians. At Three Crossings of the Sweetwater, 1,400 pounds of flour awaited the company, and rations were increased to one-and-a-half pounds of flour per person per day the rest of the trip.
The company left Florence (Winter Quarters), Neb., on July 6, and never camped twice in the same spot until they reached the Valley on Sept. 24, 1860.
Mary Ann Stucki Hafen, age 6, a member of the company, remembered, "At times we met or were passed by the overland stage coach with its passengers and mail bags and drawn by four fine horses. When the Pony Express dashed past it seemed almost like the wind racing over the prairie."
Once in Utah, John and Harriet went to the church offices and inquired about some of Harriet's relatives who had come to Utah earlier. They found that they had settled in Hyde Park, Utah, so John and Harriet traveled on to Hyde Park, arriving Oct. 9, 1860. They settled in Hyde Park and had their final three children there. During this period they helped John's parents immigrate from England to settle near them in Hyde Park.
The passenger list from the ship, John C. Boyd, shows a John and Martha Bloomfield aboard (almost certainly John Jr.'s parents). This ship, which carried 702 passengers, left April 23, 1862, from Liverpool and arrived June 1 of the same year at New York City. The presiding Latter-day Saint official on board was James S. Brown.
Harriet and John were sealed in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City on Nov. 14, 1862. But then, when John's youngest son was less than two years old, Harriet died, Jan. 2, 1868, at age 28, leaving John with three small children to raise.
About one year later in Salt Lake City, John married a widow named Elizabeth Ann Barton, who also had three small children. She had been a plural wife of Henry Ashcroft, who had died May 9, 1867. John and Elizabeth Ann combined their families and had seven more children together.
They stayed in Hyde Park until 1876, when the Church called them to help colonize Arizona along the Little Colorado River. While here in Sunset, Ariz., John and Harriet's daughter Elizabeth Salome married Joseph Henry James in 1877, and about 18 months later their youngest daughter, Mary Eliza, also married Joseph Henry James.
John and Elizabeth Ann did not stay long in Sunset, however. Flooding and other problems created difficulties, so in 1881 they moved to a Mormon settlement at Ramah, N.M. They built a home here, but moved again in 1885 to assist in the Mormon colonization of northern Mexico. Their final child, Alexander Finley, was born Aug. 4, 1887, in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, near the colony where Joseph Henry James and the two Bloomfield sisters had settled.
In 1894, John and Elizabeth Ann returned to Ramah, where they remained the rest of their lives. In 1912, after Joseph Henry James had died in a logging accident and the Mexican Revolution had made conditions unsafe south of the border, Mary Eliza Bloomfield moved with eight children to Ramah, where she also lived the remainder of her life. John Bloomfield died at Ramah and was buried Jan. 7, 1916, at age 84.
Elizabeth Ann had died about two years earlier at the age of 74. |