MARY ANN “POLLY” BULLOCK ROBERTS
19 Sep 1829 – 18 Aug 1901

Mary Ann, my third great grandmother on my mother’s mother’s side, was born in Moira, New York, the daughter of Benjamin and Dorothy Kimball Bullock of Grafton, New Hampshire. Mary Ann’s ancestry can be traced back to two different pilgrims who came to America aboard the Mayflower: Thomas Rogers, b. 1571 in Walford, Northampton and James Chilton, b. 1563 in Canterbury, Kent.

It is said that Mary Ann’s father, Benjamin, took Michael Chandler, the purveyor of the Egyptian mummies and papyruses, to meet Joseph Smith Jr., the first Mormon prophet, who was evidently so enamored with them, he had the Mormon church purchase them for $6,000 and later translated one papyrus into the controversial Book of Abraham, part of the Mormon Pearl of Great Price.

Benjamin was so impressed with Joseph Smith Jr. that he returned to New York and sold his farm and home, taking his wife and family to live with the Mormons in Kirtland, Ohio. There, they met with mob violence and, soon afterward, were forced into Far West, Missouri. In the spring of 1839, directed by a cousin, Heber C. Kimball, they left for the state of Illinois where they helped to build the city of Nauvoo. When the family was forced out of Nauvoo by mobs in 1846, they regrouped in Iowa, in a place that later became known as Bullock Grove.

On June 20, 1852, most of the Bullock clan headed for Utah Valley, including Mary Ann’s brother, Isaac, who was in charge of the company, as well as both of her parents. She would never see her parents alive again. Mary Ann moved to Kansas City. Her father, Benjamin, took ill from cholera on the trail and died and was buried without a coffin on the banks of the Platte River. Her mother, Dorothy, died just short of her first year in Utah before Mary Ann finally arrived there.

In Utah, Mary Ann met and married Jesse Thompson Hartley, a “Gentile” attorney from Oregon. Jesse was evidently denounced by Brigham Young in a conference in Salt Lake. Sometime shortly afterward, he was shot in the back of the head while riding horseback across a stream in East Canyon by the notorious Wild Bill Hickman, Brigham’s so-called “Destroying Angel.” Hickman claims to have murdered Hartley at the behest of Apostle Orson Hyde. Several separate accounts of this incident have been published, including one in Hickman’s own autobiography and one in Fifteen Years Among the Mormons by Mary Ettie V. Smith. At the time of her husband’s death, Mary Ann was pregnant with the couple’s first child, whom she named Jesse Jr., in his honor. He died nine months after he was born.

In a state of bereavement, Mary Ann agreed to go to Fort Supply, Wyoming with her brother, Captain Isaac Bullock, who had been called by Brigham Young to establish a Mormon trading post and ferry for the purposes of immigration. While there, she met and married Benjamin Morgan Roberts. The couple had their first child, Benjamin Morgan Roberts, Jr., my second great grandfather, while still in Wyoming.