author
Adelia B. Cox Sidwell
1841–1925
Remembered for a family-centered pioneer biography, this Utah writer preserved the story of an early Latter-day Saint blacksmith and frontier settler in clear, personal detail.
1 Audiobook
Orville Southerland Cox, Pioneer of 1847
by Adelia B. Cox Sidwell
About the author
Born in Illinois in 1841, she was Adelia Belinda Cox Sidwell, the daughter of pioneer Orville Southerland Cox. Genealogy and memorial records place her later life in Manti, Utah, where she died in 1925.
She is best known as the author of Orville Southerland Cox, Pioneer of 1847, a biographical sketch drawn in part from work she prepared for the Daughters of the Pioneers in Manti in 1913. The book reflects a close family connection to its subject and helps preserve one strand of western and Latter-day Saint pioneer history.
Reliable sources available here confirm the outline of her life and authorship, but not many broader personal details. Even so, her surviving work suggests a writer motivated by memory, heritage, and the wish to keep a family and community story from being lost.