Elmina Shepard Taylor
American Mormon leader (1830-1904)

Anstis Elmina Shepard Taylor (September 12, 1830 – December 6, 1904) was the first general president of what is today the Young Women organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and was a founding member of the National Council of Women of the United States.
Biography
Anstis E. Shepard was born in Middlefield, New York to David Spaulding Shepard and Rosella Bailey. She was the oldest of their two daughters. Her parents were devout members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She attended the Harwick Academy, and following her graduation she left home in 1854 to teach school in Haverstraw, New York, where she met John Druce, a member of the LDS Church. She was taught by Druce and baptized into the church on July 5, 1856. On August 31, 1856, she married George Hamilton Taylor, another convert, in Haverstraw. They left New York for Utah on April 15, 1859. She met with the Edward Stevenson Company that left from Quincy, Illinois, in June 1859 and arrived in Salt Lake City on September 16.
In Utah, they started a successful lumber company.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5366782. VIAF identifies the subject as 5192155566439613380000. The Library of Congress control number is no2019051077. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1830, 1904, 1854 and 1856.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elmina Shepard Taylor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.