Family History

Finding Maggie

One of my family history treasures is the Book of Remembrance that belonged to my grandmother, Mary Anne Hamilton Frost, nicknamed Mollie.  Mollie and her sister Margaret (Peg) became interested in the church when they heard the missionaries talk about baptism for the dead in a street meeting in Belfast, Ireland, in 1910.  They stopped to listen because they had three brothers who had died young, and they were concerned about their fate after death because they hadn’t been baptized. The Hamilton family had read about baptism for the dead in their family Bible study, but neither their father, their grandfather nor their minister could explain the meaning of 1 Corinthians 15:29 satisfactorily. 

Mollie studied the gospel and attended church for more than six months before she was baptized in 1911.  Because of her father’s displeasure at her baptism—she reported in her personal history that he was “dead set against the Mormons”—Mollie left Ireland the next year at age 26 and immigrated to Canada.  In 1913, she moved to the U.S. where she met Herbert Frost, an immigrant from England.

Herbert was not a church member when they married, but Mollie was committed to the Gospel throughout her life.  Because of Herbert’s job as a valet, they moved and traveled a lot, but everywhere they lived she sought out the church. She was the “genealogical secretary” in her stake in New York City in the early 1930’s, and the first meetings of the Newport, Rhode Island branch were held in the Frosts’ home in 1941.  My dad was born in 1917, and she raised him as a faithful church member—he was even ordained a teacher by President Heber J. Grant in 1932 when President Grant was touring missions in the eastern U.S. My grandfather eventually joined the church in 1955, and when my grandparents moved to Idaho in 1957, they were sealed in the Idaho Falls Temple.

Herbert, Mollie, and Herb Frost; about 1945

Mollie’s Book of Remembrance was passed down to me, and two years ago I decided to methodically check through it to make sure all the information was on FamilySearch.  I noticed that she wrote every little bit of information down.  All her research was done through letters, and often she only noted snippets of information. But, through her notes, I have been able to extend our family tree and find some of the forgotten branches.  Recently, I was looking at the Maxwell family, some of Mollie’s first cousins.  On the line of Robert Maxwell, I noticed the name of his wife Maggie with no other information.

Through the miracle of online resources, I found Maggie!  Using the excellent site: irishgenealogy.ie which has indexes and images of Irish civil registration records, I began looking for a Robert Maxwell married to a Margaret.  I found 4 possible matches and, luckily because Robert’s father was a sea captain and was listed in the registration, I discovered that Maggie was Margaret Kennedy, daughter of Edward Kennedy, a sailor.  Then, using the National Archives of Ireland, I found Robert and Margaret in the 1901 census in Pottinger, County Down, Ireland, living with their 1-year-old daughter, Susanna Davis Maxwell.  By returning to irishgenealogy.ie and doing a search for children named Maxwell between 1898-1910, I found her brother John, who was born in 1902.  Then, by searching on FamilySearch, I found the Maxwell family of four living in Hampshire, England in 1911.

I am excited for the temples’ Phase 2-B to begin, so I can have my 12-year-old granddaughter Sophie and my 11-year-old grandson Gideon complete the baptisms and confirmations for these newly found ancestors in the Atlanta, Georgia and Tucson, Arizona temples.  And, I also bear testimony of the truthfulness of President Nelson’s words when he said, “When our hearts turn to our ancestors, something changes inside us. We feel part of something greater than ourselves.”

-Marianne Bates – TFHC – Canyon View Stake