Nancy Jane Radford

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Nancy Jane Radford's father and mother, John Whitlock Radford and Rachel Leah Smith are in the photograph above which was probably taken in 1880. Nancy Jane is not in the picture. Most of the people in this photo are members of the Ross family that resulted from Rachel Leah Smith's first marriage. At the age of 14, in 1837, Rachel Leah Smith married Andrew Jackson Ross. He was killed in a logging accident and in 1846 Rachel Leah married John Whitlock Radford. Nancy Jane Radford, born in 1847, was John and Rachel's first daughter. She married Thomas Morgan in 1871.

Rachel Leah Smith's son James Richard Ross is in the photo above but her son Melvin Ross, who was the father of three of the boys and one girl in the picture, is absent. We know he was in prison in 1880 which explains his absence from the picture. We haven't yet been able to determine why he was in prison, although one family researcher believes it was because he was a polygamy sympathizer. Melvin himself never practiced polygamy that we know of and it seems unlikely he would be imprisoned for simply sympathizing with polygamists. So his stint in prison remains a mystery for now.

Melvin Ross married Julia Elizabeth Smith in 1862. Julia Elizabeth was injured when she fell off a wagon, between the wagonbox and wheel. Her last child was born in March, 1878 and Julia Elizabeth died in October of that year. Her daughter Sarah Lovina, who is in the picture above, married William Morgan in 1880. The baby she has in her lap was born to her first marriage to John Holden.

Short profile of Nancy Jane Radford

by Donna Bawden (found on familysearch.org)

Nancy Jane Radford Ryset Morgan, my maternal Great, Great Grandmother. Pioneer of 1850.

She was born June 14, 1847 on the prairies of central Iowa. Daughter of John and Leah Radford. Her family spent 3 years at Shirts Branch near Council Bluffs growing crops and building cabins for the Saints as they passed through. When she was 8 years old her family helped settle Fillmore, Utah. She was not quite 14 when she married Francis Frederick Ryset, a man of German descent who had come with Johnston's Army. She bore him 5 children only one of which survived to adulthood. "Frank", as he was called, set off to find work in Wyoming. She waited for him for a year, but never heard from him. She married Thomas Morgan in Oak City as a plural wife. She had 9 children with Tom Morgan with only 4 of them surviving to adulthood. Nancy died at the age of 53. Her son, Joseph said that she was a woman of great faith.