JESSE ANN EDDINGS TRIPP
17 Jun 1839 – 9 May 1923

Jesse is my third great grandmother on my mother’s father’s side. She was born in Cradley, Herefordshire, England, the youngest daughter of George Eddings and Ann Smith Eddings. Her mother, Ann, died just two years after she was born following a complicated delivery of an infant son, her sixth child, George Jr., who followed his mother to the grave just three months later.

Her father, George Eddings, was an early British convert to Mormonism, joining the church in 1840 when Wilford Woodruff came to Herefordshire and converted 600 people in a matter of days; all of whom were baptized in Benbow Pond.

George remarried and his second wife and three surviving children came to America on a schooner in 1842, eventually settling in Nauvoo, Illinois.

In 1846, the family was driven out of Nauvoo by the anti-Mormon mobs. George lost his only son from his second marriage crossing the Missouri river: another boy named George, who was buried close by the banks of the river.

George was a carpenter by trade and helped the displaced Mormons make dug-outs from sod and logs in order to survive the harsh winter of 1846 on the Iowa plains. George eventually took ill from exposure and died in Winter Quarters on 26 April 1847. Jesse, just shy of eight years of age, was placed in the care of a Mrs. Margaret Rushton and she remained in Iowa another two years until, in 1850, she emigrated to the Utah Valley as part of the Edward Hunter Company, the first company funded through church donations to the Perpetual Emigration Fund. She was just eleven years of age, part of 261 individuals and 67 wagon trains who made the journey. The company arrived in Utah on 13 Oct 1850.

In 1857, during the height of the Mormon Reformation, she met Enoch Bartlett Tripp, a visiting teacher assigned to the home where she was living and working as a nanny. Enoch wrote and obtained permission from the Mormon prophet Brigham Young to take Jesse as his third wife. The two were married in the Utah Endowement House on 20 March 1857.

Jesse would give Enoch twelve heirs, including Joseph Willard Tripp, my second great grandfather, who was born in a two-room farmhouse in South Cottonwood in Salt Lake on 12 Nov 1894.