According to Ann Eliza Young’s account in “Wife No. 19,” she was born into a devout Mormon family in 1844, in the Mormon stronghold of Nauvoo, Illinois (via NPR). She noted that her father, Chauncey G. Webb, and mother, Eliza Churchill, were some of the earliest converts to the new and growing religion. She recalled that her mother was a true believer, with a “dreamy, devoted, and mystical” outlook that nevertheless drew in Ann Eliza’s more skeptical father to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (via “Wife No. 19”).
Though her mother reportedly found great comfort in her faith, Ann Eliza claimed that the practice of polygamy “cursed her life, as it has that of every Mormon woman.” Yet, for Ann Eliza, the youngest child of five and the family’s only surviving daughter, it would have been all that she had known. Chauncey took a second wife by the time Ann Eliza was just a year old, reportedly commanded to do so by none other than prophet Joseph Smith himself (via “Wife No. 19”). Mother Eliza acquiesced, though Ann Eliza wrote that she had a “horror” of Smith’s revelation of polygamy.
Like so many of the other faithful early Mormons, moving from place to place was also a requirement. Per Encyclopedia.com, the Webb family moved first from Illinois to Missouri, and then on to Utah in 1846. Ann Eliza would have been about 2 years old at the time.
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