Miriam Works Young
Miriam Angeline Works was the first wife of Brigham Young. They married on October 8, 1824, when she was 18 years old and he was 23 years old.
Miriam was born on June 7, 1806, to Asa Works and Abigail Marks, the second of their nine children. She grew up in Aurelius, New York.
Miriam, described as “gentle” and having “beautiful, blonde, wavy hair and blue eyes” met Brigham when he was working at a pail factory near her home. Brigham’s employer was a family friend.
After their marriage, they joined the Methodist Church. Brigham supported his wife as a carpenter, “making and repairing chairs, tables, and cupboards and installing windows, doors, stairways, and fireplace mantels.”[1] They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Vilate.
In 1829, the family moved to Mendon, New York, where Brigham built them a home and a woodworking shop on his father’s property. In 1832, they were baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Brigham in April and Miriam in May. Soon after her baptism, she fell ill with tuberculosis.
- When Miriam got sick, much of the responsibility for caring for the home and their two daughters fell to Brigham. “As she became progressively more bedridden, he regularly prepared breakfast for the family, dressed his daughters, cleaned up the house, and ‘carried his wife to the rocking chair by the fireplace and left her there until he could return in the evening,’ when he cooked supper, got his family into bed, and finished the household chores… Years later . . . he teasingly boasted that he could beat ‘most of the women in the community at housekeeping.’”[2]
Miriam died on September 8, 1832, at the age of 26. Her daughters, ages 7 and 2, were cared for by Heber and Vilate Kimball while Brigham served a series of missions.
