In 1869, Lucy Stanton Bassett traveled from New York to Utah, possibly riding on the transcontinental railroad completed that May. When she reached Utah, she was reunited with her parents and children, and she met her grandchildren.
For tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans, the journey to Zion was a rite of passage, a momentous process of embracing new elements of an identity they had first chosen at the time of their baptism. Lucy Stanton, however, had a far more complex identity than that of most Mormon emigrants.
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