Seraph Cedenia Young was born in Winter Quarters, Nebraska on November 6, 1846 to Cedenia Clark and Brigham Hamilton Young, who were on their way west to the Great Basin along with other Mormon refugees. The Young family arrived in Utah with a pioneer company in October 1847.[ii] As the oldest of nine children, Seraph probably spent much of her childhood helping with household work and caring for her younger siblings. She was known as “a beautiful, refined and cultured young woman.”[iii] She was likely also a good student, because at the time of her historic vote in 1870, Seraph was a teacher at the University of Deseret’s model school, a primary school with two grades of young pupils.[iv] Whether or not she intended to be the first of the day’s 25 female voters, it makes sense that this professional woman with a long workday ahead of her would show up to the polls early, navigating her way past stump speeches and a local brass band to cast her vote in City Hall.[v] Seraph’s vote made local and national news, but it soon faded from public memory.[vi] Her life went on, quietly.

Two years later, on February 11, 1872, Seraph married a printer named Seth Leland Ford, a New Yorker who had fought for the Union army during the Civil War. Seraph and Seth had three children while living in Utah; Fred died as a toddler in 1874, but daughters Grace and Cherry survived. The Fords moved to New York in the late 1870s, perhaps to be near Seth’s family as he suffered from major health challenges due to the effects of his wartime service. Seth began receiving a pension for veteran invalids due to “blindness and spinal disease,” and he temporarily lived in a home for disabled veterans from 1882 to 1884.[vii]

Somehow, Seraph found a way to care for her blind and paralyzed husband for nearly three decades while managing a household on his small pension. One newspaper reported that “her unselfish devotion is well known by all her friends.”[viii] The Fords eventually moved to Baltimore Maryland, and later Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., to be near their two adult daughters. Seraph’s devotion to family even extended to adopting her ten-year-old granddaughter, Helen Lawrence, after her daughter Grace divorced and remarried.[ix]