Mary Anne Durfee (not to be confused with the wife of Stephen Durfee, Mary B. Durfee), daughter of Lemuel Durfee Sr. and Prudence Hathaway, was born on February 10, 1799 at 10 p.m. in Palmyra, New York. [1] She married Roswell Nichols on August 28, 1822 in Palmyra.
In Palmyra, Mary associated with the Quakers.[2] Oliver Durfee, along with his brother Lemuel Durfee Jr., acted as his father’s executor in selling the Smith property to Mary Nichols in 1849.[3]
Mary accompanied her husband to what was then considered “the West.” They lived in a log cabin in the town of Limestone, Kankakee County, Illinois. In the 1850 US Federal Census, Mary and Roswell were listed as residing in Iroquois, Illinois. According to the 1860 US Federal Census, they were again residing in Limestone. By 1870, Mary was residing in Kankakee, Illinois. Her occupation was listed as “Keeps House.”[4]
On May 3, 1883, Mary died of paralysis in Kankakee, Illinois at age eighty-four. Her funeral was conducted by J. B. Worrell of the Presbyterian Church in the presence of a large number of relatives and friends.[5] She was buried in the Mound Grove Cemetery in Kankakee.
[1] Lemuel Durfee Bible.
[2] “A Pioneer Lady Gone,” May 17, 1883, in Durfee Scrapbook No. 3, 1876–1883.
[3] Porter, “Dissertation: A Study of the Origins of the LDS Church in New York and Pennsylvania,” p. 107; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 2:49.
[4] US Federal Census, 1850 to 1870.
[5] “A Pioneer Lady Gone,” May 17, 1883, in Durfee Scrapbook No. 3, 1876–1883.