Prototype. These biographies were drafted by AI from published sources and have not yet been checked by a historian.
The Wives of Brigham Young 55 women, named — and given back their own words

The most important page on this site

Their own words

If this project has a heart, it is here. Every diary, letter, affidavit, autobiography and biography known to survive for each of the fifty-five — and, for most of them, the fact that none does. 15 of these women left anything in their own hand. Those 15 voices are the closest we can get to hearing what any of this was like from the inside, and they are worth more than every count on this site put together.

The other 40 are known only through other people's papers — usually men's. That is not a failure of our research, nor of the historians who have worked on these women: it is a fact about whose thoughts the nineteenth century thought worth keeping.

Short forms used in the citations below are set out in full, with somewhere to buy or read each one, at works cited.

Where a woman here does have a substantial literature, say so. Eliza R. Snow has a biographer in Jill Mulvay Derr and her personal writings edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher; Zina Huntington has a full biography in Four Zinas. The thin entries on this page are thin because the sources are, not because nobody looked. The scholarship is listed here.

In her own words — 15 of 55

Anything she wrote or swore: a memoir, a diary, letters, published writing, a sworn plural-marriage affidavit, courtroom testimony. For four of these women a single document is the entire surviving voice.

Written about, but silent themselves — 5

A life of her exists, written by a sister, a daughter or a descendant, but nothing from her own hand.

Neither — 35

Records of her rather than by her: an ordinance register, a ward record, an obituary, a family group sheet. Several of these women exist in the archive as a single line. Where Johnson's endnotes cite a document that turns out to be about her son, her stepfather or her sister, the entry says so — those are not counted as accounts of her.

Can you fill a gap?

If you hold a letter, a diary, a photograph or a family history for any of these women — or you know of an archive that does — please write to mormonstories@gmail.com. Given that only 15 of the fifty-five left anything in their own hand, a single family letter is a significant find.