Joseph's Story
Birth: March ??, 1839 | male | in Portage, Ohio
Death: July 16th, 1852 | 13 years old | in Winter Quarters
Memorial: Stone 3 | left column
Joseph Smith Presley is one of six children born to William Hawkins Presley and Eleanor Hepzibah Johnson, both of New York. Joseph’s parents were married in 1846. The family was living in Nauvoo when Eleanor and four of their six children passed away and are buried there.
William took Joseph and his oldest daughter, Lydia, and joined the John B. Walker Company to travel west with other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the Salt Lake Valley. William remarried Margaret Holden and they had a little girl.
Exhaustive travel conditions, disease, injury, lack of food and medicine, prematurity, and extreme weather were some of the greatest threats to pioneers. While on the journey west, cholera (a bacterial disease caused from contaminated water), invaded the camp. Joseph Smith Presley and his father William Hawkins Presley fell victims of the disease on the same day, and are buried together on the plains in Winter Quarters.