Ole Andersen Jensen & Margaret Ann Jolley

Ole Andersen Jensen & Margaret Ann Jolley are Pioneers
(Parents of Joseph Jolley Jensen, Father of Caroline Oleta Jensen, Mother of Alan J White)

When he was 14, his dear mother died. A few months later his step-father passed away as well, and Ole was left completely alone. He continued to work and make his own way in life. When he was 19 he encountered two elders who preached the gospel to him. Ole was too rebellious to heed their teachings and he soon left that park of Denmark.

            He went to Jutland to work for a farmer but it wasn’t long until they had a disagreement and Ole found himself without work or money in a strange country. He prayed to the Lord for help and guidance and the very next day he was hired by a Mormon who told him about the church. He was taught the gospel by Elder P C Geertsen and was baptized into the church of Jesus Christ in April 1859.

            He was called as a missionary in December 1860. He traveled most of the time alone, for the people were poor and one had a better chance than two to get a meal or a place to stop overnight. He was released in the spring of 1863 to go to Zion. He said good-bye to his native land, and sailed from Denmark on 3 April 1863 with 207 other saints. They traveled over land and sea from Denmark to Liverpool where they met 500 more Latter-day saints for a grand party of 708.

            They sailed to New York and took a train to Missouri and on the Florence, Nebraska. While in Florence, Ole met and fell in love with Danish immigrant Ane Marie Larsen who had arrived in the United States about a month earlier. The group bought wagons, oxen and provisions, and set out for Utah on July 5 1863.

            They arrived in Salt Lake City on the 12th of September 1863 and heard Brother Brigham preach and shook hands with him. Two days later they started for Cache Valley and arrived there on September 19th.

Margaret Ann Jolley was born in 1852 at Wingate, England. Her parents embraced the gospel when she was ten years old and they decided to come to Utah. They set sail from Liverpool in April 1862. They sailed for six weeks. They traveled to Florence where they stayed for three weeks. When the company came with the oxen and wagons they started across the weary plains. The trip took eleven weeks. All able bodied men, women and children walked fifteen to twenty miles every day. Where they came to plenty of wood and water they would stop a half day to wash their clothes and bake bread.

            Two days after they left Florence, her mother gave birth to a baby boy. She died when the baby was four weeks old. They stopped two hours to dig a shallow grave, wrap her up in a sheet and blanket, and cover the grave and build a fire on the grave to keep the wolves from digging her up. Then they were on their way. Five weeks later, her baby brother was left in another lonely grave in the mouth of Emigration Canyon near Salt Lake.