Rosetta Pettibone Snow

Rosetta Pettibone Snow was born on October 22, 1778, the oldest child of seven children born to Jacob Pettibone and Rosetta Barber, both of whom descended from Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth in 1620.

Rosetta was raised in the Farmington River Valley of Connecticut where she assisted her mother in the domestic needs of the family and learned skills that would enable her to care for her own household when she married. At age 21, she married Oliver Snow on May 6, 1800. After living in Connecticut for a time, they settled in Mantua, Ohio, on his brother-in-law’s farmland in 1805. They soon built their own cabin and later a frame house and prospered over the thirty-two years they lived in Mantua.

Rosetta bore four daughters, the second being Eliza R. Snow (who would become general president of the Relief Society in 1867), before she delivered her first son, Lorenzo who would one day become fifth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She also bore two more sons.

The Snow family helped organize a Baptist group in Mantua, and later, when Sidney Rigdon came to Mantua, they joined his Campbellite Christian group. After Joseph Smith visited her home in February 1831 and the family prayerfully investigated the gospel, Rosetta and her eldest daughter, Leonora, were baptized in 1831 and over the course of the next five years, Oliver, Eliza, and Lorenzo were also baptized. The family contributed their means for the construction of the Kirtland Temple. Rosetta and Oliver and five of their children moved to Kirtland in 1837. During the next few years, they moved with the body of the Saints to Adam-ondi-Ahman near Far West, Missouri, and Quincy then Nauvoo in Illinois. After the persecution of the Saints, Oliver became disaffected from the Church and moved to Walnut Grove, Illinois. Rosetta reluctantly went with him. He died in October 1845 and Rosetta died on October 12, 1846.

Source

Leonard Arrington, Susan Arrington Madsen, and Emily Madsen Jones, Mothers of the Prophets, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2009).