When I was young, my family spent hours on Sunday afternoons paging through my father's Book of Remembrance, looking at grainy photographs and hearing stories about our ancestors. My mother was an amateur genealogist - her name is Jean, and I thought those two words were connected - and she wanted us to be proud of our heritage.

You¹re descended from Oregon Trail pioneers on my side, she'd say, and from Mormon Trail stock on your father's side.

Between learning Oregon history at school and Mormon church history in Primary, I got all the names and dates mixed up. I imagined my mother's Blackburns and Huckins, along with my father's Faggs and Prices and Waltons in a wagon company with Moses and the Lost Tribes of Israel, everyone searching for buffalo chips while Brigham Young forded the Platte River on horseback.

But one story about Elizabeth, my great-great grandmother on my father¹s side, stood out. Actually, it wasn¹t even a story exactly, more of an image: Elizabeth, in her late 20s, standing on a dock and throwing her wedding ring into the ocean, while her young daughters watched.

At age 8 or 9, I didn't know any more details. And I didn't know why, but something in the fragment of the story intrigued me. Maybe it was because I didn't know anyone then who had been divorced. Maybe I was caught off guard by the idea of throwing away jewelry, because I prized the only real ring I owned.

It was a pink birthstone ring I won for reading the most books in the second grade, and I loved wearing it, even though the ring was so cheap it left a green mark on my finger. And like most girls, I loved trying on my mother's wedding ring during long church meetings, imagining that I would grow up someday and have a ring and a husband and children of my own.

Ring comes later: But a ring and a husband and a children didn't happen to me. Not easily. Not naturally. Not until now.

After graduating from college, I moved to Salt Lake City, and spent my 20s slogging through the desert of living singly in a very married state. I remember feeling restless, which propelled me toward an endless slate of singles parties, outdoor concerts and weekend road trips. I remember meeting men who always seemed to be looking over their shoulder for someone else to talk to, and house parties when I was grateful to slip away without revealing anything personal about myself. I remember entanglements with men that made me feel like the intellectual girlfriend, the second wife.

By my 30s, while most of my friends were either married or getting married, I had collected a handful of serious boyfriends, but never reached the ring stage. Maybe I wasn't the type, I thought. Maybe I was meant to be alone. Maybe I talked too much, maybe I was too strong-willed, too independent, too much of a feminist. Maybe I just didn't need a man enough.

Elizabeth, by contrast, married three times; three times, that is, to my none.

First she fell in love with John Fagg, my relative. My family believes he died young in a railroad accident; others claim he disappeared. Whatever happened, Elizabeth was pregnant and alone at age 19, delivering a son, John Birch Fagg, in the poorhouse.

Next, she married a handsome policeman nicknamed the Flower of Kent, with whom she had two daughters, the entire family later joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was in her late 20s when they split up, an event marked by that dramatic tossing of the ring into the sea.

About a decade later, at age 38, she launched a 5,000-mile journey from Dover, England, to Zion, walking down Emigration Canyon into the Salt Lake Valley on Sept. 15, 1868. Three months later, she married Joseph Harker, a marriage which stuck. He was a sheep rancher and "over Jordan" settler who already had two wives.

What I knew about Elizabeth didn't fit very neatly into my stereotypes of frontier-era women. There was that divorce, for one thing, and then there was that decision to throw away her wedding ring, the most valuable thing the family owned.

In Utah, when she'd barely settled into a new life with a new husband, she was gutsy enough to announce that she didn't want to live with the other wives. Which is why, in 1872, her husband installed Elizabeth on his Rush Valley sheep ranch.

Cautioned about the danger of living alone, Elizabeth claimed she wasn't scared. Armed with a jar of fruit and an umbrella, she said could take care of herself. Living in the west desert, she worked as a rural midwife, and befriended local Indians. They, in turn, called her a "heap brave squaw," according to the stories her granddaughters handed down.

Family of outsiders: "The tradition of the pioneer that is strong all through the West is a cult in Utah," Wallace Stegner wrote.

In some ways, Elizabeth didn't seem like she was part of the Cult of The Utah Pioneer, because she wasn't one of the famous ones, Mormon royalty, who crossed the plains with the original companies of settlers, or one of the authentic martyrs who died along the way.

In fact, Elizabeth barely qualified in the record books. After sending two of her children to America first, Elizabeth didn't arrive until 1868, the last year before the intercontinental railroad was completed. I joked that she was one of the few pioneer women who hadn't married Brigham Young.

When I started piecing the facts together, I started thinking of my family as outsiders, upstarts perhaps, who had arrived late to the party and didn't have much of a claim. By the time I left Salt Lake City, some years after my wise Mormon father had died, I thought of the hoopla over the state's 24th of July celebrations as provincial.

At 38, when she crossed the plains, Elizabeth was a divorced single mom. At 38, I had just finished a creative writing degree, writing essays about my connection to my family's pioneer history.

I liked mythologizing Elizabeth, not for the genealogical facts, but because I was fascinated by all the ways her life seemed to bleed outside the lines of cultural history. Certainly she was brave. Maybe she was difficult. At best, the stories we have of her life are shadowy and vague, retold by granddaughters from the stories passed down by their mothers.

I had embroidered my own myth out of the details of Elizabeth's life, thinking of her as a ballsy proto-feminist, a character as lively as Anne of Green Gables, as quick-witted as Nancy Drew.

I claimed her as my pioneer. You might even say I started stalking her.

Tracking Elizabeth: There's meaning in the dust, says poet Joy Harjo. Turn over a handful of dirt at the place something has happened, and when particles of dust float in the air, you're looking at history.

I made pilgrimages to the places where Elizabeth lived, looking for some kind of tangible evidence of her. But all the stray facts - even the date of her death (1897, not 1899, as her gravestone states) or place (Taylorsville, Utah) or circumstances (after an operation to remove tumors) - didn't reveal much of anything about her emotional life.

I laid roses on her grave at Murray's Elysian Gardens Cemetery. I drove to the West Desert to sit at the mouth of the canyon named for her husband.

I drove by the tiny house on 4800 South in Taylorsville which he had built for her in the 1880s, a structure now remodeled so many times that it was nearly unrecognizable from frontier-era photographs. In the LDS Church archives, I searched the records of the Perpetual Emigration Fund, and learned my thrifty foremother was, apparently, a deadbeat: Elizabeth still owed the church $68 for her passage to Zion.

I even spent two weeks walking across the state of Iowa as part of a pioneer trek, hoping to see through a keyhole back into history. What I got was four layers of blisters and a lost toenail.

I was interested in her story, but mostly I was obsessed by those three marriages: the mystery surrounding the disappearance of my ancestor, the man who passed down the family name (Did he die or simply abandon her?); that second marriage that ended in divorce ("I don't need a man who will hit me," Elizabeth proclaims in one family story), and finally the polygamist (Why did he build Elizabeth's house with doorways so short she had to stoop to pass under them?).

When I stood in front of the black-and-white photograph hanging in the Frontier Medicine room of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneer Museum, I wanted to read something in her face. I wanted to learn something from her about love, about marriage. I stared at her broad forehead and ruddy cheeks, noticed how her hair was pulled back from a center part, no loose ends escaping.

Two weeks later, when I saw the envelope in my mailbox, I quickly realized what had happened. A museum volunteer had gotten confused, addressing the envelope to Elizabeth with my street number. I was surprised at how eerie it felt to be opening a letter sent to a dead woman. I pulled out her photograph, and stared into her eyes.

From this distance, I couldn't tell if her eyes were blue like my father's, blue like mine. By now, my great-great grandmother's quiet and inscrutable expression seemed as familiar as the Mona Lisa's.

Late to the party: At age 46, I have racked up addresses in Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Iowa, California and New York. I have never armed myself with canned peaches, yet in all of my years as an unmarried woman, I've drawn strength from what I consider Elizabeth's hopeful independence. And the way her life, like mine, didn't conform to cultural expectations.

Now, though, that's all about to change. I'm getting married, which is why I'm here at Charley Hafen's jewelry gallery on 9th East. As he arranges hand-crafted rings on a glass display case for me to try on, somehow I don't feel qualified, like I've arrived late to another party. I joke that I'll get carded, as if I'm too old to be doing this for the first time.

In May, the day after Dan proposed, my new fiancé held my hand and waltzed me through three jewelry stores, while I argued for seeing a movie that night, and an eventual elopement. This was a year after we met, rather randomly, on a shuttle bus at a journalism conference in Las Vegas.

It's hard to know what to make of the dust of your lives before it's layered into history. But that first night, the night Dan and I met, we both felt something unfolding.

The first time I opened my mouth, he says now, he knew he didn't want to leave my side. I tell him I have never met anyone who listened so intently to what I wasn't saying. We fell in love thanks to unlimited night and weekend cell phone minutes and all the dropped connections stretching between Utah and Ohio.

Colleagues pile wedding planning books on my desk. With 12 siblings and their spouses and kids between us, the details of planning a long-distance, cross-country, cross-religious ceremony confuses me, makes me want to take a nap. Or better yet, cry.

Simple, we've agreed, let's keep this simple, we're too old to let convention rule our lives, yet all the decisions before us as two middle-ageish singletons combining our lives pile up. Shopping for a ring? That's something I can do.

When I fill out the information on the jeweler's form, I look at my own familiar block printing - ELLEN FAGG - and I'm struck by the meaning of taking on a new last name.

It's just jewelry, I know, just a ring. There are billboard advertising diamonds all over the valley. Couples buy them every day.

But this is me, this is us, and like Elizabeth, I am crossing over.

Thanks to Barbara Fagg Summers, Louise Rounds, and all the cousins on the Fagg Family History committee.

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* ELLEN FAGG can be contacted at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments to livingeditor@sltrib.com.