Andrea Christensen

Child 2 of 12

1855–1857 · 1 year, 9 months

Andrea was the second daughter, born in Denmark in November 1855 and not yet two years old when the family set out from Clear Creek, Iowa, with the seventh handcart company.

She took sick on the westward journey and died on 6 August 1857. The company reached the Salt Lake Valley thirty-eight days later. Her sister Caroline, who was three at the time, remembered it seventy years afterward as the hardest thing about the crossing — that you had to leave your people along the wayside in a barren and unknown country and keep walking.

There is a marker for her in Moroni City Cemetery, five hundred miles from where she is actually buried. The cemetery register records her plot, with plain accuracy, as On The Plains.

Her grave is the family’s earliest recorded marker. Nobody knows within a hundred miles where she lies.

All twelve children