Susan Amelia Chapman

This story was found on Ancestry.com on a page compiled by a descendent of Welcome and Susan Amelia‘s daughter Rosetta and her husband, Jerome Kempton. We are descended from Jerome and Amelia Chapman, who was Rosetta’s sister and Jerome’s second plural wife. I’m seeking contact with the compiler to obtain the sources.

Chapman married Susan Amelia Risley (1807-1888) in about 1831 and they made their home in a hamlet known as Hubbardsville in Madison County, New York where they had their first four children, all daughters. The first was a pair of twins who died in infancy.

While in Hubbardsville, they joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. First Welcome joined, to which Amelia reacted harshly, declaring “You have went and joined those awful Mormons.” However, she joined the church about six months later.

Soon, persecution against them began and their friends and neighbors shunned them and looked down on them. This was especially difficult for Amelia, as she came from a prominent family in Madison County.

Amelia’s parents were broken-hearted over their daughter joining this new, unpopular religion, but they did not turn bitter. However, Chapman’s family disowned him. The Chapmans soon moved to a Latter Day Saint community, possibly in Kirtland, Ohio, but by 1838 in Missouri.

Armed mobs drove the Chapmans from their homes in Missouri and Illinois. They built a home in Far West, Missouri, in 1838, only to be forced from the state by order of the governor that Fall. Amelia was six month’s’ pregnant when a mob gave the Chapmans and their Mormon neighbors a few hours to clear out before their homes would be burned. They remained in the area long enough for Amelia to carry the baby, a son, to full term. He was born two weeks after the Haun’ s Mill Massacre. They soon fled to Illinois, where they built a home in Nauvoo along the banks of the Mississippi River and Chapman cut stone for the Nauvoo Temple. While in Nauvoo, Amelia had three more children, all sons, one of whom died at three months.

Mobs drove them from Nauvoo in 1846, when they fled with most other Nauvoo residents across the river to Iowa, and then on to what later became known as Winter Quarters, an unsettled area along the Missouri River in present-day eastern Nebraska, where Amelia gave birth to another daughter in October 1846. Two months earlier, Brigham Young divided the Winter Quarters settlement into two “grand divisions” presided over by himself and Heber C. Kimball, respectively. Each division had two subdivisions presided over by a foreman. Chapman was foreman of the fourth subdivision, with Hosea Stout serving as its clerk. In the summer of 1848, the Chapmans crossed the plains with their six surviving children to what later became Utah Territory.

Settling Utah

The Chapmans had their final child, a son named Welcome Chapman, Jr., in the Salt Lake Valley in Fall 1849. About the same time, Brigham Young asked Chapman to help colonize the Sanpitch (now Sanpete) Valley with Isaac Morley. They arrived in November 1849 and endured a harsh winter with little shelter. Chapman was part of the first militia of Manti and used his stone cutting skills to help construct the first fort. He was also among the first group of selectmen. The young colony experienced great difficulties, but gradually began to prosper.

Amelia was born into a family of seven girls and five boys on a flax farm in upstate New York. Her mother taught the girls reading and mathematics, as well as how to cord, spin and weave wool and linen. When the Chapmans first arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, Amelia turned most of the housework over to her 12- and 14-year-old daughters while she focused on weaving Linsey-Woolsey cloth, which the young community badly needed. Contemporary accounts consider Amelia an excellent cook and housekeeper and an authority on herbal medicine. She served as a practical doctor and nurse to “neighbors for many miles around” and as a midwife. She assisted in the births of some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was more educated than her husband, which helped him during his active public life. After the Chapmans relocated to Manti, Brigham Young and other authorities from Salt Lake made the Chapman home, which was better furnished than most neighbors, their headquarters when visiting Sanpete.

• Residence: San Pete, San Pete, Utah Territory - 1850