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Chapter Six

From London to the Frontier

The Blackett Family — England to Nebraska to Utah, 1807–1878

A London Man and a Yorkshire Woman

While James Johnston was growing up on a Viking island off the top of Scotland, another family was making its own long journey toward Utah — starting from the very different world of industrial England.

Robert Collingwood Blackett was born on November 5, 1807, in London — the great capital of the British Empire, a city of nearly a million people, fog, coal smoke, and extreme inequality. His wife Eleanor Mitchell was born a year later, on October 15, 1808, in Whitby, Yorkshire — a windswept fishing town on the northeast coast of England, famous for its ruined clifftop abbey and, later, as the setting for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

They married on May 11, 1828. At some point the Blacketts encountered LDS missionaries and converted. The Church found remarkable success among working-class English families in the 1840s and 1850s, and the Blacketts were among thousands of converts who set their hearts on reaching Zion.

The Crossing — 1856

In 1856, Robert and Eleanor Blackett gathered their children and sailed from England to America. Among them was their son John William Blackett, born February 29, 1848 — a leap-year baby, just eight years old when the family crossed the Atlantic. Also traveling were Robert Collingwood Blackett Jr. (age 11) and Joseph Francis Blackett (age 6). Eleanor was 48. Robert was 49. They had left behind whatever life they had built in England for a place none of them had ever seen.

Stranded on the Nebraska Frontier

Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn. The Blacketts sailed to America in 1856 — but they did not reach Utah for years.

The 1860 United States Census places the Blackett family still in Nebraska, four years after leaving England. They were stranded on the American frontier, waiting. The overland crossing required wagons, oxen, and supplies that cost more than most immigrant families could quickly assemble. The Perpetual Emigrating Fund sometimes helped, but not always fast enough. Then the Civil War disrupted westward travel further.

For years, the Blackett family — Robert now in his fifties, Eleanor approaching sixty, John William growing from a boy into a teenager — lived on the Nebraska prairie, waiting for the moment they could finally finish the journey they had started.

The Overland Crossing — Through Wyoming

When the Blackett family finally made the overland crossing — sometime between 1860 and 1868 — they traveled the same Mormon Trail that passed through Wyoming: past Fort Laramie, along the North Platte River, past Chimney Rock, through the Sweetwater Valley, past Independence Rock, over South Pass, and down into the Salt Lake Valley. The same trail that Hugh Johnston had died on just a few years earlier.

Robert Collingwood Blackett survived the crossing. He settled in Nephi, Utah, where he died on December 19, 1878, at age 71. His wife — recorded as both Eleanor and Ellen Mitchell Blackett — died in the Tintic, Utah area on July 23, 1884, at age 75, and was laid to rest beside him in Vine Bluff Cemetery, Nephi. They had spent the last decades of their lives in the Utah they had crossed an ocean and a continent to reach.

John William Blackett Settles in Springville

John William Blackett — the leap-year baby, child emigrant, Nebraska frontier survivor — settled in Springville, Utah. There he married Elizabeth Jane Averett, the daughter of Mormon Battalion veteran Jeduthan Hardy Averett. Through that marriage, the Blackett line and the Averett line — one from industrial England, one from the Carolina frontier — joined together.

John William died in Springville on February 17, 1927, at age 78. His son Robert Earl Blackett was born in 1886. Robert married Edna Mary Knudson. Robert’s daughter Fern became Jerry’s mother. And that is how the Blackett story — from London fog to Yorkshire cliffs to Nebraska prairie to Wyoming mountains to Springville orchards — became part of this family.

Next: Chapter Seven — The Family Tree →