The other sealings

Dynastic sealings

Brigham Young was not only sealed to women. In the Nauvoo temple, grown adults were sealed to him as sons and daughters under the law of adoption — not because they were orphans, but to graft them into a priesthood lineage running back to Adam. Sixty-six people were adopted into his family. This is the part of the story that has almost nothing to do with marriage and everything to do with building a kingdom.

The shape of it, in four numbers.

66people adopted to Brigham Young
34of them grown men, sealed as his sons
6of those men can be named from the sources
1person adopted to Joseph Smith, by proxy, after his death

Why a page about men sits on a site about women. Because the same ritual that bound these wives to Brigham Young was also binding grown men to him as sons, and you cannot understand what a sealing meant to any of the fifty-five without knowing that. It was never only about marriage; it was about building a lineage, and the women were counted into it. Women adopted as daughters keep their own entry in the wives table rather than being filed here.

That last pair of numbers is the most striking thing in the record, and it is Jonathan Stapley's own observation: the founder of the religion is almost absent from the ritual, and the single adoption to him was performed by proxy, after he was dead. The practice belongs to Brigham Young. What the words meant.

The men we can name

This roster is partial, and deliberately so: 6 of 34 men - about 18 per cent. Stapley's Table 1 gives complete AGGREGATE counts but does not name the 211 individuals. The per-person roster is in Joseph F. Smith's manuscript compilation 'Sealings and Adoption, 1846-1857' (microfilm 183374, LDS Family History Library) and in Lisle Brown's register. Neither is held here. Everyone named below is traceable to Turner or Stapley; nobody has been added on a guess. Completing the roster means getting at one of those two manuscripts.

3 of these 6 men have a photograph we could licence; the rest show their initials. Every portrait was checked against its source file page before use — we would rather show nothing than the wrong man, the same rule that governs the wives. Each man also appears in the chronology, where dynastic sealings can be switched on and off.

Every adoptive family → Stapley's Table 1 in full: sixteen couples, 211 people adopted between them, and how far Brigham Young's share outruns everyone else's. What the numbers show → Whether adoptions could be undone, the four cancellations we can document, and how the whole practice was abolished in 1894.