About

About this site

Brigham Young was sealed or married to fifty-five women. There is no book about them. There is one published list, made in 1987, and it is a table.

This site exists to honour those fifty-five women and to give them back their own voices. That is the whole of it. Everything technical here — the research table, the generated counts, the build that refuses to publish a figure it cannot source — is in service of one idea: that each of these women was a person, and that she is owed the same care a historian would give a man who mattered.

What honouring them actually means

It is easy to say and harder to do, so here is what we hold ourselves to.

Every one of them is named. Not "his wives" — Lucy Ann Decker, Zina Diantha Huntington, Eliza Roxcy Snow, Mary Ann Angell, and fifty-one others. Women who appear on some lists and not others are here too, with the reason for the disagreement.

Each of them gets her own page, built around her rather than around him: where she was born, how old she was, whom she had married before, what children she bore, what happened to her after he died, whether she stayed or left.

Her own words come first where they survive. Fifteen of the fifty-five left anything in their own hand — a diary, letters, an autobiography, a sworn affidavit. Those fifteen voices are the most valuable material on this site, and we quote them rather than paraphrasing them.

The silences are named as losses, not blanks. Forty of these women left no words of their own that we can find. That is not a gap in our research. It is a fact about whose thoughts the nineteenth century bothered to keep, and we say so on every page where it applies rather than quietly moving on. The blanks here are the finding.

We never fill a silence with a guess. Inventing a woman — giving her feelings she never recorded, motives no source supports, a birthplace we would like her to have had — is another way of not listening to her. Where the record stops, this site stops, and says where it stopped.

Brigham Young is on every page, because he is the reason these fifty-five lives are connected to one another at all. But he is the context here. They are the subject.

Where the material comes from

The spine is Jeffery Ogden Johnson, "Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households", Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20:3 (Fall 1987), Table 1 — still the only comprehensive published list. Layered on top of it:

• John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard, 2012) — the standard modern biography, and the source of the polyandry counts.
• D. Michael Quinn's appendices, for children counts and the will.
• Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness for the women also sealed to Joseph Smith.
• Lisle G. Brown, Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings (Smith-Pettit, 2006) for who received which ordinance on which day.

Everything is on the resources page, and the whole table is published as a workbook, a CSV and JSON for anyone who wants to check it or build on it.

How it is built

Every page is generated from a single research table. Correct one cell and every page that uses it changes. No figure is typed twice, which is why the counts on the home page, the analysis page and the individual entries cannot drift apart — and why the build refuses to publish a count that disagrees with its source.

Three things this site will not do

It will not pick a winner where historians disagree. Turner counts about 53 wives, Johnson 55, Quinn 56. All three appear, with the reason each gives. Every disagreement is listed in full.

It will not fill a gap by inference. "Not established here" means exactly that — not zero, not no, not probably.

It will not tell you what to conclude. It is neither apologetic nor counter-apologetic, takes no position on whether any of this was inspired, and a believing reader should be able to finish every page on it. Where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published its own account of something, we link it rather than paraphrasing it.

Corrections

If a fact here is wrong, we want to fix the research table it came from, not just the page. Send the correction and the source to mormonstories@gmail.com and we will.