As Mormons prepared to leave Kirtland, Smith still continued to take an interest in Alger, for in 1836 he asked Levi Hancock to take her to Missouri with his family. . . .Despite Smith's instructions, Fanny apparently decided to go to Missouri with her own family, not with Hancock. Benjamin Johnson, though he misdated the Alger family's departure, wrote, "Soon after the Prophet['s] flight in the winter of [18]37 x 8 The Alger Family left for the west and Stoping in Indiana for a time." The Samuel Alger obituary places the family's departure from Kirtland a year earlier, in September 1836, but it notes that they stayed in Wayne County, Indiana, for a year because of bad roads, which explains the discrepancy. They started for Missouri again the following September. Fanny, however, according to Johnson, "Soon Married to one of the Citizens ther [Indiana] & altho she never left the State She did not turn from the Church nor from her friendship for the Prophet while She lived."

The 1836 departure date for the Algers is verified by the marriage certificate. . . .