Jane Pickett Barker 1848-1907
2010
Jane Pickett was born in England to George Pickett and Maria Jarvis. She was the youngest of three children, the others being Mary and James. Two years before Jane’s birth, her parents heard the message of the Gospel from the missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints and were baptized. When Jane was just three, her mother Maria Jarvis Pickett died. When she was five, Jane’s father married Priscilla Clark. She was also a convert to the Mormon Church. In 1855, Jane set sail for America in the company of her father, his new wife Priscilla, Priscilla and George’ baby daughter Louise, her brother James and her sister Mary and her father’s two brothers William and Mathew and their families.
They docked in St. Louis where Jane’s father George contracted small pox and died. Jane’s uncle William and his wife Mary cared for their brother’s children Mary, James and Jane. That fact, written in Jane’s autobiography does not explain where their step-mother was at this time. Jane and her siblings remained in St. Louis for two more years, arriving with their father’s brother in Utah in 1861. They lived first in Tooele, Utah where Uncle William had a large farm. The same year of arrival in Utah, Jane’s sister Mary died and the following year her brother James died. Jane was thus the only surviving member of her immediate family. When Priscilla Clark Pickett arrived in Utah she married again. When her daughter Louise was just twelve years of age, Priscilla was murdered in Carson City, Nevada. Jane tells us that she did not know her half-sister very well.
At the age of eighteen, Jane met John Thompson Barker at a church dance. After a lengthy courtship they were married in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City and eventually settled in the Bear Lake Valley in the town of St. Charles, Idaho. Jane and John were the parents of eleven children. The youngest, Clara Lzina Barker Pugmire is our direct ancestor. She married Justin Gerald Pugmire in Paris, Idaho. Jane is buried with her husband John in the St. Charles City Cemetery, St. Charles, Idaho.
The migration of Jane Pickett Barker
England to Missouri to Utah to Idaho