Margaret Nebraska Imlay was born June 5, 1853, on the plains of Nebraska, while her parents were traveling to Utah. Her father was James Havens Imlay and her mother was Anna Eliza Coward. Her father, along with Anthony W. Ivins and Israel Ivins, was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Elder Erastus Snow after just one meeting. Then they journeyed together to Salt Lake City instead of going to California gold fields as they had intended.
A little more than two weeks after Margaret was born her sister, age 1½ years, died on the plains. They arrived in Salt Lake City and stayed there for quite some time, during which her parents had two more children born to them. Early in 1864, they were living in New Harmony, Utah, where her sister, Keziah, was born.
Shortly after her fifteenth birthday, Margaret was married to George Washington Sevy on August 29, 1868, in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. George was 36 years old at the time and she was his second wife (the first polygamous one). For a few years they lived in Panguitch where her first four children were born. The first three all died in infancy, and by the time her fourth child (George Francis) was born, she poured all her motherly love into caring for him, and as a result he was thoroughly spoiled. How he ever grew out of it is truly a mystery, as there were ten years of this spoiling before “Maggie” had another child.
Maggie was quite a favorite with everyone. She was full of life and fun and grace, and was a regular “cutup,” always ready to do her part in anything, and being the life of any party. She enjoyed telling a “gutsy” story and did not worry whether the listener was male or female. If she thought it was interesting, she told it. At times her language became “rich,” especially when she was angry or upset, or just plain full of nonsense. She saw no reason to “hold her tongue” just because others did not use the same expressions she did.
She was a hard worker, for besides her dairying, she kept an extremely neat and clean house, did all her own washing, ironing, mending, knitting, and sewing. She made socks for the whole family. People marveled at this small woman and how fast and hard she worked. Every afternoon she would pick up her knitting or mending and go visit a friend or dear one while she worked. This was, for her, recreation, and she became noted for these visits and loved deeply for them. Years after her death, her children were respected as the “son or daughter of Maggie Sevey!”
During the time the government was after the polygamists, the marshals were hunting George, along with several others. George and Maggie had to remain in hiding—going from one town to another, mostly by night, staying with friends. Those were hard times, for neither George nor Maggie could get out and work for fear of being found and put in jail.
All her adult life Maggie kept a dairy, milking the cows herself, since she was better at it than most men. In 1885, George moved to Mexico with his third wife, Martha Ann, and every summer Maggie went to her Panguitch Lake ranch and milked her large herd of cows. Then she made and sold butter and cheese. She had quite a number of cows her of her own that her father and brothers had given her. These cows her brothers cared for and branded with her own brand, rather than that of her husband. They feared that if they allowed George to brand them or to care for them, the animals would be considered his, and confiscated if and when he was ever apprehended. But Maggie didn’t let her brothers do her milking—that would be shirking, so she did all her milking herself.
In 1887, George came back to Panguitch from Mexico and took Maggie and her son back with him to Mexico, leaving Panguitch in November and arriving in Colonia Juarez on January 1, 1888. For a while she and her son lived in the tithing office in Colonia Juarez, and while still there, her next child, Minerva Elizabeth was born. Shortly thereafter she went with her husband to cook for him and his men while they worked up some farmland that he had purchased in what was known as the “Upper Fields.” He had two pieces of land there and for a while they camped under the trees while he built a one-room frame cabin for her on the upper of these two places, located at the head of the irrigation ditch.
Maggie lived there for a couple of years and her next child, Phoebe Vilate, was born there. Her husband did some trading with his land and acquired about 27 acres together at the lower site. Then he purchased a piece from Joseph Cardon, which had a house on it. He moved Maggie into it, and she lived there the rest of her life. Her last child, Leon Lorenzo, was born there in 1895.
When they first arrived in Mexico, Maggie had very little with which to feed her family. She used cornmeal in many ways, making mush, corn bread, and any other way she could think of, using molasses for sweetening, until her husband, George, finally traded for three cows. Again Maggie went into the dairying business, and with the vegetables from her little garden and the milk, butter and cheese from her dairy, she again was able to set a fine meal before her family.
In a few years she had about 40 cows to milk and take care of. They were all of good stock, and she was careful to breed them well. She gave her family a warm breakfast by candlelight, milked her cows twice daily, made cheese every day, churned butter three times a week, did all her own housework, cooked three hot meals a day, and many times she had two to six or eight extra people to feed.
In 1896, George took a contract on the railroad, building from El Paso, Texas, to Colonia Dublan, Mexico, and Maggie was there cooking in a tent for all his hands, and with Mahala, George’s daughter from his third wife, giving her the much needed help in every way possible. She loved her work and was always jolly and full of fun, keeping everyone happy and contented.
It was while at this camp, that Maggie began to feel the pains of the disease which eventually took her life. In the spring she returned home. She soon was so ill the doctor could no longer help her—she had cancer. However, it was kept from her until about two months before her death.
Little Maggie, who had made life so pleasant for so many others, was suffering now the tortuous pains of cancer! She had such a lot of faith and had tried to rear her children in the love of the Gospel, though because of her distance from the meeting house and the type of work she was engaged in (dairying), she had been deprived of many Church activities herself. Little Maggie who was honest to a fault, and fearless in defending the right, who did not hesitate to tell people what she thought and how she felt, whether or not it be to their liking. A small, brown-haired, blue-eyed woman who had myriads of friends both male and female, was now faced with a cruel enemy whom she couldn’t fight. Still a young woman—in her early forties—she had lived a full and happy life. She had a good kind husband and a lovely family. But her family was still very young! How she hated the thoughts of leaving them!
George, who had been bishop in Colonia Juarez for 12 years, now gave it up and took his wife to Utah, hoping to find Dr. Blackburn, whom he hoped could help her before it was too late. However, the journey was so long and strenuous, that Maggie died before she reached the doctor. She died near Loa, Utah, on October 19, 1897, and her husband took her to Panguitch and buried her there in his family plot, near his first wife, Phoebe.