Mary Ann Weston Maughan: The Dressmaker's Apprentice Whose Landlords Led Her to the Gospel

Mary Ann Weston (March 10, 1817 – 1901) was born in Corse, Gloucestershire, England. In 1839, seeking to learn her trade, she took up an apprenticeship as a dressmaker and went to live with a young couple in The Leigh, Gloucestershire: William and Eliza Phelps Jenkins.

It was through the Jenkinses that Mary Ann first heard the gospel of the Restored Church. William Jenkins had been converted by Wilford Woodruff during his 1840 mission to Gloucestershire, and the Jenkins home became a place where the gospel was taught and embraced.

Mary Ann was baptized in 1840, becoming part of one of the most extraordinary waves of conversion in early Church history. She emigrated to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1841 — sailing from Bristol to Quebec and then making her way to the gathering place of the Saints.

She eventually married Peter Maughan and settled in Cache Valley, Utah, where she became a pillar of the pioneer community. Her autobiography, written between 1894 and 1898, is one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of an English convert's experience: the conversion, the transatlantic voyage, the gathering to Nauvoo, and the trek west.

Her story beautifully illustrates the providential nature of the Restoration — a dressmaker's apprenticeship led a young woman to the very home where the gospel would find her. Mary Ann Weston Maughan lived to the age of 84, a faithful witness to the Restoration she had embraced as a young woman in England.