Rogers, Aurelia Spencer

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See this page in the original 1992 publication.

Author: Cazier, Shirley A.

Aurelia Spencer Rogers (1834-1922), the first primary president of the Church, was born October 4, 1834, in Deep River, Connecticut, to Catherine Curtis and Orson Spencer, a Protestant minister. When Aurelia was six years old, her parents joined the Church and traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois. Years later, Aurelia's suggestions helped establish the Primary Association, the Church organization for children.

"Aurelia came by her concern for children through a long apprenticeship in mothering" (Madsen, p. 1). At the age of twelve, she and her older sister, Ellen, cared for four younger siblings when their mother died and their father was called by Church leaders to head the missionary work in Great Britain. The children lived on their own in winter quarters, Nebraska, with limited provisions and then made the arduous trek to the Great Salt Lake basin. Wilford Woodruff, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, wrote their father that "although in childhood, their faith, patience,…longsuffering and wisdom…[were] such as would have done honor to a Saint of thirty years" (Rogers, pp. 103-104).

At age seventeen Aurelia married Thomas Rogers. Through the next twenty-two years, she gave birth to twelve children, of whom only seven survived infancy. When three infants died in succession, she despaired and nearly lost her faith and belief in God; but a letter from her father came to mind and helped her gradually overcome her malaise. Her travail through the loss of children heightened her sensitivity to the preciousness of life and to the importance of nurturing the young.

Thomas and Aurelia Rogers lived all their married life in Farmington, Utah, a community sixteen miles north of Salt Lake City. Observing the rowdiness of children on the street, Aurelia Rogers wondered if an organization could be formed to teach them better deportment and moral and spiritual values. She brought the matter to the attention of Eliza R. Snow, president of the Relief Society, who shared her concern and subsequently gained the support of Church leaders.

On August 11, 1878, Aurelia Spencer Rogers was set apart as president of the Farmington Ward Primary, the first Primary in the Church. Her counselors, Louisa Haight and Helen M. Miller, helped her organize the children into age groups; and on August 25, 1878, they held the first Primary meeting, with 224 children present, beginning what is today a fully developed curriculum for children.

Although Eliza R. Snow and her immediate associates organized most of the Primaries throughout Church settlements, important impetus came from the work of Rogers in the development of Primary in and near Farmington, for which she received many honors. In 1897, in recognition of her role in founding the Primary, the children of the Church raised the funds to publish her book, Life Sketches (1898).

In the winter of 1894-1895, Aurelia Rogers also served as one of three Utah suffragist delegates to the Woman's Suffrage Convention in Atlanta and attended the Second Triennial Congress of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C.

Although she suffered ill health for much of her life, Aurelia Rogers often said, "Cheerfulness and pleasant thoughts help to produce longevity" (p. 298). She must have practiced this principle, as she lived to be eighty-seven. She died August 19, 1922.



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