Jean Rio Baker: An English Widow Who Gathered to Zion with Seven Children (1851)

Jean Rio Baker (later Jean Rio Baker Pearce) was a 40-year-old widow with seven children who, having been baptized into the Church by Elder John Taylor, left London on January 4, 1851, and boarded a ship at Liverpool with her children to gather to Zion in the Salt Lake Valley. Her remarkable passage—recorded and later told in Sally Denton's 'Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West'—is a faith-promoting testimony of a convert's courage: leaving home, family, and country, a widowed mother trusting that the gospel restored through the latter-day prophet was worth every sacrifice to reach. Her emigration is preserved among the treasures of pioneer experience held by the Church History Museum.