On the 9th day of December, 1828, a young married couple, George and Ann Cannon, then living in the city of Liverpool, England, rejoiced in the birth of their second child--a daughter--whom they named Mary Alice. There was nothing about the child or her brother, George Q., who was two years her senior, or their parents, to distinguish them from the many thousands of other families who lived in that great city. The father was an intelligent and industrious tradesman--an expert carpenter, or joiner--and the mother a thoroughly domestic woman, whose love for her husband and children was only equalled by the strength of her religious fervor. Though England had been the adopted home of this branch of the Cannon family since many years before their marriage, the most of their relatives lived in the Isle of Man, and thither the family went on occasional visits. On one of these visits, at the earnest solicitation of her maternal grandmother, little Mary Alice was left to bear her company, and spent five years of her childhood in the quaint old town of Peel, for this purpose. In course of time the Cannon family was enlarged by the successive births of other children--Ann, Angus, John, David and Leonora. John, however, died when three and a half years of age. Prosperity had attended the father's labors, the family had a comfortable and happy home, the older children were acquiring an education, and gave promise of being like other children among the better class in England--no worse than the majority, and not much if any better. When Mary Alice was about 11 years of age, an event occurred that was destined to change the whole current of the family life. If there is any truth in the theory of heredity, it was well for the Cannon family that their ancestors, for generations, had been hardy sea-faring men--some of them captains, conspicuous for their courage and adventurous disposition. It was well that their ancestral home was in the Isle of Man, where the inhabitants, largely fishermen, are inured to hardship and used to battling with the waves and braving the tempest. If any of the traits possessed by their ancestors had been inherited by the present generation, and especially strength of will and endurance, two of the most prominent characteristics of the Manx people--they must certainly be called into action in the strenuous life that lay before the Cannon family, thenceforward. Some years previously Leonora Cannon, a sister of George Cannon, had migrated to Canada, and there met and married a young Englishman named John Taylor. Parley P. Pratt, as a Latter-day Saint missionary, soon afterwards visited the part of Canada where the Taylors lived, and they were converted and joined their fortunes with the Saints in Ohio. From Nauvoo John Taylor was sent on a mission to Great Britain, and immediately upon landing called upon his wife's brother and family.