Phoebe Adams Hancock

BIRTHDATE: 7 Jun 1811 Middlesex, Ontario, New York

DEATH: 4 Feb 1897 Payson, Utah Co., Utah

PARENTS: Isaac Adams and Betsy Adams

PIONEER: Sep 1849 Allen Taylor WagonTrain

SPOUSE: Solomon Hancock

MARRIED: 28 Jun 1836 New York

DEATH SP: 2 Dec 1847 Winter Quarters, Iowa

CHILDREN:

Isaac Adams 14 Aug 1837

Alta 18 Jun 1840

Solomon Jr. 2 Jun 1842

Elijah 13 Apr 1844

Jacob 28 Dec 1845/6

At the age of twenty-five, in 1836, she was working for a family by spinning wool into yarn when she heard that two elders would be preaching that evening. She hurried home and asked her mother to go with her.

After the meeting her mother asked the Elders to come to their home. To her great surprise she found that one Elder, Solomon Hancock, was the man her mother's sister, Alta, had married twenty years previously.

Solomon told them that Alta had given birth to ten children, but only four had survived; then she died after the mobs continued casting them out of their home and burning it to the ground.

When Solomon was ready to return to his home he asked Phoebe to be his wife and mother to his children. She readily accepted. She was baptized June 18, 1836, and married to Solomon on June 28, 1836. Five children were born to them, whom she cared for along with Solomon's four surviving children.

Phoebe was called to part with her husband in December, 1847, near Winter Quarters, Iowa. He being only fifty-four years of age. Two of her step-sons were called to join the Mormon Battalion, leaving Phoebe to cross the Plains alone with seven children. She arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September, 1849, and in 1851 they moved to Payson.

She was called "Aunt Phoebe," and step-son said of her, "Her goodness, kindness and mothering was more than could be expected by any woman under the circumstances."

At the age of eighty-six she contracted pneumonia passing away at her daughter's home in February, 1897.

"A Short Sketch of the Hancock and Adams Families" by Charles Brent Hancock, apprx 1880 photocopied from LDS microfische by Janet Cloward Roasio