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Thank you for visiting - I do hope that you will find something/someone of interest to you in your search for family history within my great- great grandparents family.

This page will be added to for a long time, as I suspect it will take that long to gather histories and pictures of Grandpa and Grandma Alger, as well as his other spouses and all of their children, as well as who all of their descendants are. But I'm going to update it as I get information. Any mistakes, or errors are not intentional and may be in the original data or in my entering that data, so be patient and write to me and let me know about any that you see and I'll correct them. Also, please let me know if you have photos or additional information on the descendants.
 
 

Contents:

                                 Ancestors      Descendants      Photo Album
 
 
 

Relative Links:

     Histories/Pictures of John Alger and family - web site of John P. Pratt
      (click on 'My family picture, My family's homepages, and Genealogy' - then 'Family Genealogy'
              - then 'John P. Pratt' - then on the 'next' to the right of the name, Anne Alger)

      Foremothers - Alger family web page by Carol Easterbrook Wolf

     Whitney Family Organization

     Bits of Ivory - by Barbara Williams,
       a descendant of John and Sarah's daughter, Sarah Ann Alger Cowley

      The Manx (Isle of Man) Mormons page - where Sarah Anne's husband, William Edward Cowley is from

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HISTORY OF JOHN ALGER  1820 –1897
(original text was passed down to Florence McMullin Jensen)

John Alger was born in Astabula County, in the northeast corner of Ohio, 5 November 1820.  He was the son of Samuel and Clarissa Hancock Alger.  He was baptized with his parents in 1830.

Very early in John’s life he met and became associated with Zera Pulsipher, who was to have a great influence on his life’s work.

Zera Pulsipher was a farmer in New York where he received and read a copy of the Book of Mormon.  He became converted and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.   After joining the church he filled a mission to Canada where among his converts was Wilford Woodruff whom he baptized a member of the Church.   After Zera returned home he moved with his family to Kirtland, Ohio in 1837.  It was here the families met and cast their lots with the Church and its growth and progress.   They were never separated again.

After the Saints were compelled to leave Ohio and Missouri, having built the temple in Kirtland and failing to establish a refuge or gathering place for the Saints, they went to Nauvoo, Illinois to start anew.

On 6 January 1842 John Alger married Sarah Pulsipher, daughter of Zera Pulsipher and Mary Brown.   They were married by the Prophet Joseph Smith.   And through this marriage John became a member of the Pulsipher family which would take a very active part in the building of the Church in Illinois and in the migration west to establish themselves in the valley of the mountains.

At the time of his marriage, John was 22 years of age and a skilled workman as a carpenter and wheelwright.   At the time of this marriage, work was beginning on the second temple built in this dispensation at Nauvoo.   To what extent John assisted in the building work of the temple is not recorded.   Before the Saints were to abandon the building and their loved city, John and Sarah received their endowments in the temple 7 January 1846.

When it became know that the Saints would be forced to move west, John spent much time making wagons and preparing other articles that would be needed in making such a long trip of hardships and privations.      (The famous all wood wagon that brought Father Bundy completely across the plains was made by John Alger.)

In February 1846 when the move was started, he and his wife Sarah and daughter Sarah Ann, born 13 April 1845 joined the party.   They had buried a little son, Nelson, in Nauvoo.   After they arrived at Winter Quarters, Nebraska in 1846, it was too late in the season to attempt a thousand mile journey over the desert and through the mountains so they remained there through the winter.  While at Winter Quarters, another daughter, Olivia, was born 23 June 1847.

In April 1847 Brigham Young left with a selected few to find the way and to locate a place for his people.  He counseled those who remained to prepare ways and means for their trip ahead.   Here John Alger could use his skill to make wagons and equipment that could make the long trip.

By the spring of 1848 Father Zera Pulsipher was preparing to head a company of the Saints as Captain.   This group consisted of 100 wagons.   Included in this group were John Alger, his wife Sarah and their small daughters; also Zera Pulsipher’s family,  Samuel Alger and wife, Clarissa Hancock Alger.   This group arrived in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake between September 20-24 1848.

John Alger settled at Far West, which was located north of Salt Lake, and his wife Sarah went to Salt Lake to be confined with her third daughter, Adeliza, born 09 August 1849.   At the time of Johnston’s Army he was directed by Brigham Young to burn the sawmill and bury all the iron and come to Salt Lake to prepare once more to defend their home and religion.

After the trouble was over John continued in his profession at his new location in Salt Lake that was given him as his inheritance or place to establish his home.   It is shown on the Orson Pratt map, Block 62 Great Salt Lake survey.

It was during the winter of 1857-58 that John was called out into the mountains to help prevent the Army sent by the Federal Government, under Gen. Johnston, from coming into the Valley.  Sarah and family with others were moved south as far as Payson because of their fear.

While the John Alger family made their home in Salt Lake City three other children were born:  John Zera, Martha Ellen and Ann Eliza.   The seventh child, Samuel Nelson was born at the home of Sarah’s half sister, Susan Pulsipher Crandal in Payson.

When Johnston’s Army was permitted to enter Salt Lake City and go on 35 miles to Cedar Valley because of their surrender in the summer of 1858, the Saints moved back to their homes.  John Alger never returned to Far West or to his mill. While living in Salt Lake City two other children were born, Alva Don and Willard Edgar.

On 26 October 1861 John Alger took his second wife, Jane Ann Burnett.  (The histories and Family Group Sheet disagree on the order in which plural wives were taken.) They were married in the old Endowment House at Salt Lake City.   The families moved to Beaver where John Alger went into partnership with Lafayette Shepart who had a gristmill.   John furnished the saw mill and planing layout.  In 1863 William E. Cowley joined the partnership being a blacksmith.

John Alger joined his eldest daughter, Sarah Ann, to William E. Cowley in marriage.

In the next year, 1864, John Alger, Sarah (1) and Jane (2), William and Sarah Ann Alger Cowley, Samuel and Clarissa Hancock Alger (parents of John Alger) were c
(note: I am indebted to Carol Wolf for this history and the letter below - thank you)alled by President Brigham Young to go to the Dixie Mission.   Such families as the Pulsiphers and Algers, because of their qualifications, were needed in the plan of President Young to extend the territory where all Saints could prosper.   A call was made for Zera Pulsipher, his sons, John, William and Charles, and his sons-in-law Thomas S. Terry and John Alger to go to St. George.   It was hard to give up their homes, which they had spent thirteen years making.   This new call to service was to be the hardest ever assigned to the Alger family.   Samuel and Clarissa Hancock Alger and family located at Parowan.   John Alger and families went on to St. George and built their homes there.   He located on fraction Block 4 Plat A on Diagonal St. Here he built a stucco frame house.   He also helped his brother-in-law, Charles Pulsipher, build him a stucco frame house on Lot 6, Block 39 at the head of First West Street on Diagonal.   These buildings still stand as evidence of the skill and workmanship of these builders.

These men were also needed in other lines as the live stock must be cared for and pastures found for the cattle of settlers.

Erastus Snow, President of Washington Stake, called John Alger and John and William Pulsipher to take care of the surplus stock which was being grazed in Diamond Valley.   John located at a spring in the north central party of the valley, afterwards called Alger Canyon.   William E. Cowley spent a great deal of time with him after returning from his trip with James Andrus in the Black Hawk War.

 Later when Joseph Price married Ann Alger they located and lived at a spring in the northeast part of the valley as more room and pasture was needed for the ever-growing herds of cattle.   Locations were found farther to the west and north.   John also had a ranch located in a place called Little Pine Valley.   The valley was at the head of Shoal Creek.   It was down this creek where the stream turns east to flow out into the Escalante Desert that the town of Hebron was located, and settled by Zera Pulsipher, his sons and sons-in-law.   It was while living at Hebron that the eleventh child was born to John and Sarah Alger.   It was their last and was named Mary Edna, born 09 December 1865.

John Alger took part in locating setters at Hamblin in the north end of the Mountain Meadows in Clover Valley.   After this pioneering he returned to St. George where Sarah and her family had continue to live.  Jane Ann was with him in all of his movings.

John Alger filled a mission to the Eastern States, Ohio being his headquarters.  On returning he brought his brother Alva and sister-in-law (whose husband had been killed in the Civil War) and small boy back to St. George.

While at St. George, John’s first wife Sarah Pulsipher Alger was set apart at the dedication of the St. George Temple as a worker.   She worked there thirty-one years, eighteen years at Matron.   At the time of her death in 1909 she was the last of the group that was set apart at the dedication.

While at St. George John devoted his time to making saddletrees and axe and hammer handles, an industry much needed.  At that time most every family must have had one or more saddles.   In this work he shaped the stock, made of native wood, to fit the back of a horse then covered the saddle tree with dressed rawhide which when the rawhide dried made the saddle tree strong as though it was made of molded iron.   The finished shape was now ready for the finishing work of covering with leather to make a beautiful job of a skilled builder.   He could also make nice furniture, chairs with woven fine rawhide bottoms, wooden dolls and he also made an entire harness for his two little mules.

John was a man who loved dancing and entertainment.  He liked to sing and did his part at parties and social gatherings.

Like other pioneers who had moved from their first location along the Atlantic seaboard onto the west, there to remain for but a short time, then to move on to some new location and start all over again, John from 1848 when he entered the Salt Lake Valley until 1879 had been out on the frontier locating and preparing new places for settlements.  He acquired farmland in the St. George-Santa Clara field.   Part of the land had been cleared and was farmed but he felt he must have more land for his wife, Jane Ann, and her four boys and two girls.   He traded the farmland to Alex Fullerton for a wagon and horses.   He then moved Jane's family to a location on the Beaver Dam Wash on a piece of land below where Henry W. Miller and others had started a settlement but had moved away because the floods had washed away most of their land and homes.   Here he and his family of small boys struggled alone for years until the boys were mostly grown.

Sarah’s sons, John, Samuel and Willard moved to what was then called Castle Valley, Emery County.   The brother-in- law, William E. Cowley, wife Sarah Ann, eight sons and two daughters also came in 1886.   In this move Jane and her boys joined them in 1890.   They later settled on a farm and ranch in Nine Mile, Carbon County.   They farmed, raised cattle and worked for a man named Preston Nutter.   John Alger visited them once in this home.   They finished their lifetime in this place.   Sarah Ann’s family located at Cleveland, Emery County.   The Huntington River was diverted and a new start of pioneering was begun.

After his family of Jane’s boys made their last move, John Alger, who was nearing 70 years old, was too old to continue building new places as he had done in times past.   For over forty years he had been a pioneer in the Valleys of the Mountains.   He felt lost and alone not having to carry on in the work of finding and building places for new homes for the gathering of the Latter Day Saints.

The remaining years of his life he spent with members of his family.   Sometimes he visited with his daughter, Ann and husband Joe Price at Diamond Valley, or with his daughter, Adeliza who had been left a widow by the death of her husband, Andrew B. McArthur, or his daughter Olivia Bryson.

He died 04 February 1897 at St. George and was buried in the St. George Cemetery. Thus closes a life of seventy-seven years, forty-eight of which had been spent as a builder and frontiersman.

(note: I am indebted to Carol Wolf for this history and the letter below - thank you)

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A letter by John Alger,
May 9th, 1868, Salt Lake City
(spelling, grammar and punctuation are John's )

Dear Brothers, Sisters andfriends

Thinking a line from me mite not come amifs with you, I atempt to write a few lines to you all who are interested in our wellfair. All our folks are well as a general thing. Sarah has a fine boy, born fryday morning. Mother Pulsipher is hear now taking care of Sarah.

Old man baly came to father Pulsipher some time ago and told him that President Young told him to go to him (father Pulsipher) and that he should marry a cert a in girl to him, which father Pulsipher done which has caused him to loose his standing in the presidency. We are all very sorry that he commited such an over sight, but it is as it is and can't be helped. It is a very hard rap in his old age.

I was at the Council and so was Thomas. We were well satisfide with the Council on that ocasion as they shoed very respect toards him as posible under the circumstances. A few words to Brother John Pulsipher. Brother Railey has managed to get your Land from you. I done All I could to prevent it but I had not the evidence to rebut the arguments that he prodused. A nother ____ below or not until the Book were josted they granted me 20 acres from Brother Hufakers, it was layed before Brother George and Elder Woodruf they have curtailed Brother Hafakers to theyer land.

I hope to see you before long, yours as ever,
John Alger - May 9, 1868

 

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 Last updated 31 May 06
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