[6] As a black woman, Jane was not allowed to enter the temple during her lifetime and petitioned the First Presidency of the church multiple times to be endowed and sealed.

[5] Although late in Jane's life her brother Isaac stated that she had been born in 1813,[8] there are source discrepancies that place her birthday anywhere from September 22, 1812, to the year 1820 or 1822 (the latter being asserted on her gravestone[9]).

[6] The Mannings were a free family living in rural Connecticut, and Jane had at least five siblings including Isaac, Lewis, Peter, Sarah, and Angeline.

[8][6] The James family began their journey with other recently converted Latter Day Saints under the direction of Charles Wandell, and traveled from Fairfield, Connecticut, to New York City, then on to Albany and Buffalo.

[6] Wandell made arrangements to transport their luggage while James and her family traveled the remainder of their journey (approximately 800 miles) on foot, arriving in Nauvoo in late fall of 1843.

[17][16] Isaac was born a free man and grew up in rural New Jersey; at the time of his baptism he was 19 years old, and was one of the earliest immigrants to Nauvoo.

[6] At the time of their settlement in the Salt Lake Valley, the James family made up a third of the black population in Utah, and were the only ones who were free.

[18] The James family lived just north of Temple Square in Salt Lake City on a lot owned by Brigham Young, who employed both Isaac and Jane through the mid-1850s.

In 1849, James' neighbor Eliza Partridge Lyman had sent her husband Amasa on a mission to California and was left with no food to sustain her and her children until the harvest.

"[5] By the mid 1860s the family were able to build a comfortable home in the southwest corner of Salt Lake City and had acquired both farmland and animals, including an ox, horses, and a small flock of sheep.

[22] The family was growing quickly as well, and between 1848 and 1860 five children were born: Miriam, Ellen Madora, Jessie Jeroboam, Isaac, and Vilate.

[6] During these years James both managed a household of children and small grandchildren, and also worked as a domestic servant in order to make ends meet.

[6] After a twenty-year absence, James' first husband Isaac returned to Utah very ill, and lived with Jane until his death in 1891, and though the two never remarried his funeral was held at her home.

[21] In her later life, both she and her brother Isaac J. Manning received reserved seats near the front and center of the Salt Lake Tabernacle for church services.

Lewis, like Elijah Abel, had been ordained to the priesthood during Joseph Smith's lifetime, and James therefore assumed that he would be eligible for temple ordinances.

James made her final written petition in August 1903 to then-church president Joseph F. Smith, asking him to allow her to "finish the work I have begun for my dead.

[8] In 1979, nearly 72 years after her death, James was endowed by proxy by a group of black and white Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Temple.

The film was directed by Margaret Blair Young, co-author with Darius Gray of the Standing on the Promises trilogy of historical fiction that draws on the facts of James's life.

[7] In June 1999, a monument to James's life was dedicated near her grave in the Salt Lake City Cemetery also by the Genesis Group, along with the Missouri Mormon Frontier Foundation.