180 years ago today - 1834. October 4

[Founder of the Primary and feminist] (Aurelia S. Rogers) Her family joined the Church and moved to Nauvoo when she was seven. Aurelia learned to smoke a pipe at her grandmother's knee, but finally responded to a "monitor within that told me it was wrong, and what it would lead to if persisted in: I should be, if I lived, an old lady smoker. This thought disgusted me, for I never did like to see women smoke."

Aurelia was only thirteen when her mother died during the Nauvoo exodus. Orson Spencer related the last days of his wife's life: "Under the influence of a severe cold, she gradually wasted away, telling her children, from time to time, how she wanted them to live and conduct themselves, when they should become motherless and pilgrims in a strange land."

Aurelia and her older sister Ellen cared for the other four children in Winter Quarters while their father filled a mission to England.

[Source: Van Wagoner, Richard and Walker, Steven C., A Book of Mormons, http://amzn.to/newmormonstudies]

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