Grandma Ann

Brought by her parents, at age four, from a manor farm in Sheffield England where she was born in 1845, Ann Willden crossed the Atlantic, sailed up the Mississippi River and traveled by wagon train to the raw land of south Utah. There, with her family, she spent her childhood, helping to build homes and towns out of nothing except hard work and dreams. A child bride before her fifteenth birthday, she was a mother three times over, when she and her husband decided to flee the rigors of the Mormon Church and establish themselves in California. Ten years and three children later they acquired a homestead in the San Fernando Valley, where her last four children were born. From the writings of her daughter, Mary Proctor, and her own existing letters, her story is told of hardships, love and death, courage, fear and the deep pleasure of accomplishment. GRANDMA ANN will take you back in time to harsher times and gentler spirits.