Conversion Story: Jonathan Campbell and his wife Phoebe Eunice Button joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1832, when they were both about 71 years old. Their oldest son, Benajah, was the first to join the Church in November of 1830. They lived just 1/2 mile south of the New York border, in Ridgebury, Bradford, Pennsylvania, which was about 70 miles from Harmony, Susquehanna, Pennsylvania where the Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon and less than 70 miles from Fayette, Seneca, New York, where the Church was organized in 1830. The aged Jonathan and Phoebe may have moved to be with the Latter-day Saints at Kirtland, Ohio with some of his sons in about 1835, but probably left when persecution increased in 1837. Whether they stayed elsewhere in Ohio or moved back to New York is unknown. Phoebe Eunice died in 1841 or 1847 in Eaton, Ohio or Eaton, Madison, New York. Jonathan may have died in 1849 in Caton, Steuben, New York. An unverified source said he died along the Mormon Trail at Mount Pisgah, Iowa in 1849, but since he would have been about 88 years old and his family was not there at that time, it makes that story unlikely to be true. Some of their family did die along the Mormon Trail as many of their posterity trekked across the plains to Utah. ______________________________ PAF documentation notes and sources: The first of the family to join the church was Jonathan Campbell's son, Benajiah, in November of 1830, a scant seven months after the church was founded at Fayette, Seneca County, New York. Jonathan and his wife, Phoebe Eunice Button, were baptized in 1832, at the same time that Brigham Young was baptized. |