Testimonies from Young Women of the Restoration

When Elvira Stevens was required to leave her home and family in Nauvoo and travel across the plains to Zion, she sought the spiritual strength and the heavenly power of the temple.

When 12-year-old Mary Elizabeth Rollins first gained her own testimony of the Book of Mormon, she could not have imagined what lay ahead. Just a year later, she watched mobs burn haystacks, saw Church leaders tarred and feathered, and risked her own life to save pages of scriptures from men who were destroying the printing office. But her faith carried her through.

After Brigham Young asked his daughters to dress less extravagantly, his daughter Zina willingly responded by removing ruffles from her dresses. When a young man she knew insultingly told her that she now looked like “a yard of pump water,” Zina wasn’t discouraged. In matters of faith, she had a lot in common with another brave Zina—her mother.

As a young woman living in a comfortable three-story house in New York, Zina Huntington thought life was a little dull. Then one day she returned home to find a strange new book on the windowsill, and her life would never be the same.

It was no ordinary sacrament meeting when 12-year-old Genevieve Johnson heard an Apostle tell about his remarkable vision of Jesus Christ—and felt her own testimony of the Savior burn brightly within her.

Whether living in large cities, Scandinavian villages, or small rural towns, such as Moroni, Utah, members of the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association of the 1880s created their own manuscript periodicals. In each issue, they wrote anecdotes, sermonettes, and poetry and bore testimony. Lena Jensen, a member of the Moroni Ward, Sanpete Stake, shared her testimony of virtue in the ward manuscript periodical entitled  The Young Ladies Advocate.