Sarah Melsome Hughes Gardner

Gardiner/Hodgkinson

I have wanted to document the stories of how each of our ancestors joined the church.   This is the story of Sarah Melsome Hughes and her husband William Edward Gardiner.  They were the first ones to join the church on the Hodgkinson line.  She is the mother of Hepzibah Gardiner Hodgkinson, Grandmother of Lewis Martin Hodgkinson and Great Grandmother to Melvin J. Hodgkinson.  Her daughter Hepzibah recounts this story:

I was born 7 May 1854 at Chalford Hill, Gloucestershire, England.  My mother died when I was three years old.  She left eight children, the baby being only a few months old.  It died a few months after Mother died.

Mother died a martyr.  She wasn't very well at a time when there was going to be an outdoor meeting (to hear the LDS missionaries Orson Pratt and Charles W. Penrose), so Father asked her if she would go if he took a chair for her to sit on.  As soon as the meeting started, a mob came and broke up the meeting by throwing clods, rocks and rotten eggs at the people.  Mother got the worst of it and she died soon after.  Before her death she was blessed with the gift of tongues and declared until the last the Gospel was true.

When Mother realized she was dying she asked my brother, John, to call all her children to her bedside, then she said, "Now, children, listen to every word I say as I am about to leave you and I want you all to remember what I say.  Where ever you are, on land or on sea, be true to the Gospel, for the Gospel is true.  Yes, the Gospel is true."  Then she breathed her last.  Not one of us ever forgot our mother's plea.  We all immigrated to Utah and were all staunch members of the Church.  Charles W. Penrose, a Mormon missionary, conducted Mother's funeral.