Life
Abel was born in Maryland as a slave, and is believed to have escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad into Canada. He was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in September 1832 by Ezekiel Roberts, and he married Mary Ann Adams, another African-American.
Abel was ordained an elder on March 3, 1836 in Kirtland, Ohio by Joseph Smith. In 1839, Abel was made a member of the Nauvoo Seventies Quorum. While living in Nauvoo, Illinois, he worked as a mortician at the request of Joseph Smith.
In 1841, when Smith was arrested in Quincy, Illinois, Abel was among a group of seven elders who set out from Nauvoo to try to rescue him, although by the time they reached Quincy, Smith had been taken back to Nauvoo. In 1842 he was a carpenter in Cincinnati, working for John Price at the corner of 6th and Smith Streets, per the Cincinnati city directory. He remained in Cincinnati for a number of years.
In 1843, Abel served a mission in New York, but returned to Cincinnati, where he married Mary Ann Adams about 1847. Their first child, Moroni Abel was born there in 1849, and in 1850, per the 1850 Census of Cincinnati, they were boarding Henry Nisonger and his family; Nisonger was an Apostle in the schismatic Williamite Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which recognized William Smith, the only surviving brother of Joseph Smith as its prophet.
In 1853 he and his family migrated in the Appleton Harmon pioneer company to Utah Territory, where he managed a hotel.
In Utah, Abel remained a seventy, and in 1884 he served a final mission in Canada, during which he became ill. He died upon his return home to Utah Territory and was buried at Salt Lake City Cemetery.
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—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
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—Bible: New Testament, Luke 12:17-20.
“‘Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
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Bearing it crushed and mystified.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)