[1][2] She was raised in Maine until the age of twelve, when she began living with her mother's sister, Charlotte (née McLellan) Coffin and her family to Edgartown, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard.

Boarding another steamer, Jernegan sailed for ten days to reach San Francisco, where she was delayed two weeks awaiting passage to Honolulu.

[7] Sailing aboard the Oriole for Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, they made their way back to New Bedford, Massachusetts, after passing Cape Horn, arriving in September 1866.

[9] Jernegan spent her days aboard ship watching the children and piecing by hand a log cabin quilt, which would contain 2310 strips of fabric.

[13] By October, Jared had returned and unwilling to be separated longer from his family, they joined him aboard ship when he sailed in November to hunt whales near the equator.

The family spent five months at sea making stops at Ohitahoo, where Jernegan was reported to have been the first white woman to land on that Marquesas Island and Nuku Hiva.

They spent eight days on Ohitahoo and the children encountered bananas, breadfruit, coconuts, guavas, lemons, limes, mamey apples, oranges, pineapples and plantains, writing home about the variety of fruit.

[14] Returned from the north by December, once again Jared took the family aboard and made for the equator by way of Maria Island (also known as the Peru atoll) in the between season of 1870.

[17] Jared's ship was lost on the voyage, but he returned to join his family in Edgartown, where the couple's youngest child, Marcus Jernegan, was born in 1872.

In 1954, the NBC Radio program Inheritance featured an episode, "The Whale Hunters" which was narrated by George Lefferts about the Jernigan family voyage of 1870–1871.