Ancestry Magazine

I always found Edmond Harris, my great-great-great-grandfather, mysterious. While family stories and documents abounded on most of my ancestors, not one word or piece of paper had been passed down about him. All I had were a few dates filled in on a family pedigree chart.

The information I collected about his later life appeared fairly straight-forward. Edmond joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and left England to come to Utah where he married Kerstina Nilsdotter, a Swedish immigrant, around 1862. They had at least eight children and lived in several communities throughout Utah before Edmond died in Gunnison in 1881.

But my initial efforts to learn more about his early life turned up some puzzling information. Indexes directed me to church records in Sydney, Australia, and to a marriage record in London that showed Edmond marrying Eliza Barrett in 1847. Details, such as Edmond’s birth date and place in the Australian record and his father’s name and occupation in the London record, left little doubt that I was on the trail of the right Edmond, yet I had no prior knowledge of the family living in Australia. And no U.S. or family record had ever hinted at the existence of a wife prior to Kerstina. My curiosity was peaked. Who was Eliza? And what happened to her?

I decided then that my research would have to expand to include Eliza as well.

Searches over the next year revealed part of the family story. Edmond had moved to London from nearby Buckinghamshire sometime in the 1840s. Here, he met and married Eliza. They joined the LDS Church in January of 1849, and later that year, they left for Australia.

The English government paid their fares as part of the assisted immigration program—a program designed to clear out England’s poor. They settled in Maitland, near Sydney, where they had two children, Maria and Lister.

I had learned a lot about the family, but I still hadn’t answered my question—what happened to Eliza? By now, more than curiosity propelled me on. In the process of the time-consuming searches I’d performed on this family, I had developed a connection to them, particularly to Eliza whose disappearance from the records perplexed me. I felt drawn—almost obligated—to uncover her story.

My breakthrough came in a cascade of information that I stumbled onto late one night. Just out of curiosity, I conducted an Internet search for the ship on which they sailed to America—the Julia Ann. That’s when I found the following information:
“Only one ship that carried LDS passengers ever wrecked in the 1840–1890 time period. The Julia Ann is the ship with that distinction.”

With that information as a starting point, I was able to locate numerous diaries, letters, and memoirs (a number of which were found in a research paper, “The Wreck of the Julia Ann,” written by BYU student Devitry Smith in 1989) and learn more about the fate of Eliza.

Eliza boarded the Julia Ann with her two children—two-year-old Maria and six-month-old Lister—and fifty-three other passengers on 7 September 1855. The trip was to take three months, ending in San Francisco. It appeared that the family may not have had the money to fund Edmond’s journey at the time. Rather than waiting, Eliza and the children left for America without Edmond.

By 4 October, the ship had been out nearly a month. Throughout the day, the captain steered through an area filled with threatening reefs. By nightfall, it appeared the danger had passed. Then a call rang out, “Hard down the helm.”

The lookout had spotted somethin g in the distance, but couldn’t make out what it was. He hurried below to retrieve his glasses. Before he could return, the ship crashed into a reef. The consequences were immediate and disastrous. Benjamin Pond, the ship’s captain, wrote, “I sprang to my feet but was nearly thrown upon the floor by the violent striking of the ship.” Heavy waves pounded the ship sideways against the reef. The stern section lifted onto the reef and the bow fell deep into the water. A large hole opened and booms swung violently across the deck.

The ship was not sinking—it was breaking apart. Even worse, there was no land in sight. Captain Pond “instantly saw there was no hope for the ship, and very little for the lives of those on board.” The waves washed two young girls overboard. They were never seen again.

Word soon came for everyone to gather in the cabin. Parents hurried below, yanking their children out of bed. Esther Spangenburg, a passenger, saw “mothers holding their undressed children in their arms as they snatched them from their slumbers, screaming and lamenting.”

Even in the cabin, water covered the deck and continued to seep in as waves pounded mercilessly against the ship. Wrote Spangenberg, “When I reached the cabin, the scene can never be erased from my memory—mothers screaming, children clinging to them in terror, furniture torn from its lashing, the ship lying on her side.”

Meanwhile, the crew had begun implementing a desperate plan. One crew member swam to the nearby reef and attached a rope to it. Passengers then began making their way, hand-over-hand, slowly and painstakingly, to the highest part of the reef. The reef offered little refuge or safety, but the plan represented their only chance for survival.

Eliza must have recognized that there was no way she could carry a baby and make her way to the reef—she would need both hands to grip the rope. So she lashed Lister a cross her chest in an effort to save his life.

Another call echoed through the ship, “Hold on all!”

Then “an awful sea struck the ship, tearing up the bulwarks, threatening death and destruction to everything within reach.” The Julia Ann broke in two across the hatch. Wrote Captain Pond, “The sea had stove in the forward part of my cabin and washed away the starboard staterooms, taking with it two women and a child. The poor mother had lashed her infant to her bosom.” Eliza and Lister were drowned.

By the time it was all over, a total of five passengers had drowned. The remaining passengers eventually located a nearby island where, for the next month, they survived until they were able to send a makeshift boat to reach help.

Records indicate that two-year-old Maria had survived the wreck and headed for San Francisco with the group. However, as far as I can tell, she was never reunited with Edmond, although he did travel to San Francisco, presumably looking for her.

Edmond had lost his entire family by the time he arrived in Utah. And, until now any knowledge that this family ever existed had been lost to his descendents.

Eliza Barrett isn’t my blood relative. Yet there are, perhaps, no other ancestors from this early period on whom I have such detailed information. When the Julia Ann crashed, Eliza was alone with her two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son. On the night I uncovered the story, one hundred fifty years later, my own two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son slept in the room next to me. For just a moment, as I read her story, I felt a bond I’ve felt to few, if any, of my blood relatives.

Eliza has no descendents that I know of to preserve her story or even her existence—but I will always consider her part of my family tree.