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Ann R. McDonald
(Mill Girl)
Ann's life has been difficult to reconstruct from the meager sources I have found on her. She was a Mormon woman who married John Gould May 22, 1842 in Lowell (who were “both of Lowell”). Sometime soon after her marriage, “Ann R. Gould” became ill with “fever” and checked into the Lowell Corporation Hospital where she was treated, cured, and released. The hospital records tell us that she was 20 in 1842, and had been born in Winthrop, Kennebec, Maine.
Rev. Theodore Edson of St. Anne's Episcopal Church of Lowell mentioned in his journal an Ann McDonald visiting Lowell from Danvers (near Salem) on Good Friday, April 9, 1841 , as well as various other times. This was either John McDonald's wife, Ann Cunningham McDonald, or their daughter, Ann, all born in Paisley, Scotland. The McDonalds seem to have been involved in something Edson called “the Scotch Corp.” (Martha Mayo, Saint Anne’s Church and Rev. Theodore Edson, p. 114, no date, online PDF at http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/ed1.pdf, accessed January 13, 2008.) While it is possible that Ann McDonald of Danvers is the same one who married John Gould in Lowell, Danvers vital records document that an Ann McDonald from Danvers married Andrew S. Furber of Chelmsford or on August 14, 1841.
Ann McDonald Gould is mentioned in Apostle Wilford Woodruff's journal for October 1848.
There are also records of an Ann Rosorry (or Rosary) Gould who was in Nauvoo in January 1846. At that time she married Thatcher “Clark” Hallett there as his plural wife; he was a Seventy. According to Nauvoo records, she had been born in Waterville, Kennebec, Maine in 1818. Since their birthplaces are in the same county and their ages are similar, it is possible that Ann R. McDonald Gould of Lowell left her husband, John, and migrated to Nauvoo where she remarried Hallett. In fact, the 1850 Census of Lowell (p. 585) lists John "Goulds" as a 28 year-old laborer born in Massachusetts who was living with the Samuel Pickering family and a few other single male mill workers.
Thatcher Clark and his first wife, Phebe Bray Hallett, allegedly died at Mt. Pisgah, Iowa in 1852; but this contradicts the fact that their three young children, Thatcher C., Hyrum, and Mary E. Hallett were listed in the 1850 Census of Great Salt Lake City, Utah (p. 97), which was actually enumerated in April 1851. (Still, due to the seasonal nature of such migration back then, the children would have had to have arrived in Utah no later than October 1850.) It's difficult to imagine that parents would send small children on an overland journey like that alone, while they remained in Iowa for two more years, before dying. What happened to Ann Rosorry Gould Hallett is unknown. She does not seem to have made it to Utah.
"Lowell Mormons" has no official connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
© 2005-2007 Connell O'Donovan. All rights reserved.
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