Fanny Alger - Biography

Biography

Frances W. Alger Custer was born to Samuel and Clarissa Hancock Alger on September 20, 1816, in Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts, the fourth of eleven children. Samuel was a carpenter who had built a house for the father of future Mormon leader Heber C. Kimball. Clarissa was a sister of Mormon stalwart Levi W. Hancock.

The Algers first moved to Ashtabula, Ohio, and then to Mayfield, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, ten miles southwest of the Mormon settlement at Kirtland. In 1830, Samuel (and apparently Clarissa) were baptized into Mormonism and thus became some of its earliest converts.

In September 1836, after Fanny had spent some time as a teenage servant in the home of Joseph and Emma Smith, the Algers left Kirtland. Joseph Smith asked Fanny's uncle, Levi Hancock, to conduct her to Missouri, but she accompanied her parents instead. The Algers stopped in Dublin, Wayne County, Indiana, and there Fanny met and, on November 16, 1838, married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon, listed in various censuses as a grocer, baker, and merchant. Although her parents continued on their way to Nauvoo, Illinois, and eventually Utah, the Custers remained in Indiana. Fanny bore nine children, only two of whom survived her. In 1874 she joined the Universalist church in Dublin. Her funeral was held at the Dublin church after she died at the home of her son in Indianapolis on November 29, 1889.

Many years later, an early acquaintance remembered the young Alger of Kirtland as a "very nice and comely young woman...toward whom...everyone seemed partial for the amiability of her character." Her obituary reported that in Indiana she was "generally beloved by all who knew her and was noted for her benevolence of spirit and generous-heartedness."