Further reading
Resources
Everything we used, and everything we know of that a researcher on this subject would want — gathered so that the next person who wants to hear these women does not have to start from nothing. The section that matters most is the journals, diaries and biographies of the wives themselves: the places where their own voices are actually held. Links were checked on the build date at the foot of the page; tell us at mormonstories@gmail.com.
Start with these four
If you read nothing else, read these. Between them they contain almost everything that has been published about the fifty-five women.
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"Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households" Jeffery Ogden JohnsonDialogue - A Journal of Mormon Thought 20:3 (Fall 1987), pp. 57-70, Table 1 at pp. 65-71
The only comprehensive published list of Brigham Young's wives, and the spine of this site. Names, marriage dates, birth and death years, prior husbands. Johnson's own conclusion is worth reading in full - that most of these women took part in the church for the rest of their lives, which "tends to dispel the myth of the horrified woman, enslaved against her will." from Dialogue's own archive.
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Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet John G. TurnerHarvard University Press, 2012The standard modern biography, and the best single book on the man. Chapter 5 covers the Nauvoo marriages. Note what it does not contain: no appendix of wives, no list. Endnote 56 (pp. 441-42) naming the fifteen women legally married to other men is its only published roster.
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In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith Todd ComptonSignature Books, 1997Not about Brigham Young - but it is the model for the book these women still do not have, and eight of Joseph Smith's widows are also on Brigham Young's list, so chapters 3, 4, 13, 18 and 25 are directly relevant.
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Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings: A Comprehensive Register of Persons Receiving LDS Temple Ordinances, 1841-1846 Lisle G. BrownThe Smith-Pettit Foundation / Signature Books, 2006Who received which ordinance, on which day, with which proxy. The document behind most of the "sealing type" column on this site. Pages 350-53 cover Brigham Young.
The two projects this site is modelled on
One gave the women biographies; the other put a whole evidentiary record on the open web for free. This site is trying to do both for Brigham Young's fifty-five.
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Joseph Smith's Polygamy (josephsmithspolygamy.org) Brian C. Hales
A free, public, document-by-document reference on Joseph Smith's plural marriages, with a page for each woman, timelines and the sources attached. The direct model for this site. Hales writes as a believing Latter-day Saint and much of the site answers critics; this site is neither apologetic nor counter-apologetic, and takes no position on whether any of it was inspired. What we take from him is the method — sourced, free, public, checkable, organised around the women one at a time — not the posture.
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Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 volumes Brian C. HalesGreg Kofford Books, 2013The scholarship behind the website. Volume 1 covers the history, volume 2 the doctrine, volume 3 the theology; Don Bradley did much of the documentary research for volume 1. Read alongside Compton, who reaches different conclusions from a good deal of the same evidence.
Buy it AmazonBookshop.org
Further books
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The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power D. Michael QuinnSignature Books, 1994 - Appendix 6Counts 56 wives, keeping Maria Lawrence. Also the source for several children counts and will markers used here.
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The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power D. Michael QuinnSignature Books, 1997 - chapter 5
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Brigham Young - American Moses Leonard J. ArringtonAlfred A. Knopf, 1985The previous standard biography, by the Church's own historian. Gentler than Turner and still valuable on the Utah administration.
Buy it AmazonBookshop.org
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Mormon Polygamy: A History Richard S. Van WagonerSignature Books, 2nd ed. 1989 -
The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young Richard S. Van Wagoner (editor)The Smith-Pettit Foundation, 5 vols., 2009
Fuller than the Journal of Discourses, which only ever printed a selection. The right place to check a quotation.
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Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young Virginia KernsUniversity of Utah Press, 2021
On Sally (Kahpeputz) Young Kanosh, the Pahvant Ute girl brought into the household in the late 1840s and frequently misdescribed as one of his wives. She was not. Why that matters.
Buy it Bookshop.org
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Wife No. 19, or The Story of a Life in Bondage Ann Eliza YoungDustin, Gilman & Co., 1875The nineteenth-century bestseller by the wife who left him, sued him and toured against him. Written to destroy him and read for 150 years as though it were the only wife's voice available. Public domain; scans are on the Internet Archive.
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Isn't One Wife Enough? The Story of Mormon Polygamy Kimball YoungHenry Holt, 1954A sociologist's study, and a great-grandson's. Dated, but full of family material.
Buy it Bookshop.org
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A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 Laurel Thatcher UlrichAlfred A. Knopf, 2017
A Pulitzer-winning historian reconstructing this world out of the women's own diaries. Winner of the Evans Biography Award. The single most important book to read alongside this site, and the one an earlier version of this page wrongly implied did not exist.
Buy it Benchmark Books
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Four Zinas: A Story of Mormon Women Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage WoodwardSignature Books, 2000
A full multi-generational biography centred on Zina Diantha Huntington, no. 17 on this site's list. Proof that a Brigham Young wife can carry a book of her own.
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The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, editorUniversity of Utah Press, 1995
Eliza R. Snow is no. 8 here. Much of what she says in her own voice on this site reaches it through this edition.
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More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 Kathryn M. DaynesUniversity of Illinois Press, 2001
The social history of the system these fifty-five marriages sat inside.
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Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle Jessie L. EmbryUniversity of Utah Press, 1987
What plural households were actually like, built from oral histories.
Articles and chapters
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"Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism" Jonathan A. StapleyJournal of Mormon History 37:3 (2011)
The clearest modern account of the law of adoption - the ritual that explains the strangest rows in this data. What adoption was.
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"Emily Dow Partridge Smith Young on Trial: The Chicago Interview, 1892" H. Michael MarquardtJournal of Mormon History 34:3 (2008)
One of the disputed marriage dates on this site turns on this article. The disagreement.
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"Brigham Young Genealogy" Susa Young Gates and Mabel SanbornUtah Genealogical and Historical Magazine vol. 11 (July 1920), p. 131
The family's own list, compiled by his daughter and granddaughter. The reason Quinn keeps Maria Lawrence on the roster when Johnson drops her.
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"The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1830-1900" Gordon IrvingBYU Studies 14:3 (1974)
Published lists of the wives
There are fewer of these than anyone expects. This is the entire set we know of; tell us what we have missed.
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Johnson, Dialogue 20:3 (1987), Table 1
55 wives. Comprehensive. The spine of this site.
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Quinn, Origins of Power, Appendix 6
56 wives - Johnson's list plus Maria Lawrence.
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Turner, Pioneer Prophet, endnote 56 (pp. 441-42)
Not a list of wives. A list of the fifteen women who were legally married to other men at the time of their sealing. Frequently mistaken for a roster.
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Gates and Sanborn, "Brigham Young Genealogy" (1920)
The family's own compilation, and the earliest of these.
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Dean C. Jessee's editorial work on the Brigham Young papers
Drops Maria Lawrence, agreeing with Johnson.
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This site's table
Johnson's 55 with every subsequent correction applied and every disagreement flagged. Available as JSON for anyone who wants to build on it.
Scholars on Brigham Young
Living and dead, ordered by how much each has actually published on Brigham Young rather than by standing in the field generally. The last two wrote about Joseph Smith: they are the model for this project, not scholars of its subject. If you are looking for someone to write the book, this is roughly the field.
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John G. Turner George Mason University - livingThe standard modern biography. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard, 2012) is the book every page here leans on after Johnson's table. A frequent guest on the Brigham Young Podcast.
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Leonard J. Arrington 1917-1999The major biography before Turner's. Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf, 1985). Church Historian, founder of the "New Mormon History", and the man who opened the archives that made most of the work below possible.
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RWRichard S. Van Wagoner 1946-2010
The largest body of Brigham Young material of anyone here. Editor of The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young in five volumes, and author of Mormon Polygamy: A History, still the standard single-volume account of the practice.
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JJJeffery Ogden Johnson Archivist - made the only comprehensive list, 1987
He compiled the only comprehensive published list of the fifty-five. "Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households", Dialogue 20:3 (1987). Table 1 of that article is the backbone of this entire site, and nobody has superseded it in forty years.
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D. Michael Quinn 1944-2021The Mormon Hierarchy volumes, whose appendices carry his own count of the wives and children — his is the 56 that keeps Maria Lawrence. Excommunicated in 1993.
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ECEugene E. Campbell 1915-1986
Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West, 1847-1869 — the institutional history of exactly the years Brigham Young ran Utah.
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Jonathan A. Stapley Independent historian - livingThe authority on the ritual system these marriages belonged to. "Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism", JMH 37:3 (2011), is the source for this site's whole dynastic sealings section, including the sixty-six people adopted into Brigham Young's family.
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Lisle G. Brown Marshall University - livingCompiler of Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings, the register that records which of these women received which ordinance on which day in the temple.
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Laurel Thatcher UlrichPulitzer Prize-winning historian, emerita at Harvard, and author of A House Full of Females (2017) — the major modern account of this world, built out of the women's own diaries and covering the years Brigham Young was marrying.
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Jill Mulvay Derr Historian - livingBiographer of Eliza R. Snow, no. 8 on this site's list, and four decades on nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint women.
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MBMaureen Ursenbach Beecher
Editor of The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow — much of what a Brigham Young wife says in her own voice on this site reaches it through her work.
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MBMartha Sonntag Bradley
Co-author of Four Zinas, the multi-generational biography of Zina Huntington, no. 17 on this site's list.
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KDKathryn M. Daynes
Author of More Wives Than One (2001), the standard social history of the marriage system these fifty-five marriages belonged to.
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HMH. Michael Marquardt Independent researcher - living
Documentary work on the Nauvoo marriages and their dating — the kind of close work that settles which date on this site is right.
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Lindsay Hansen Park Independent historian - livingCreator of Year of Polygamy, the series that showed what telling these women's lives one episode at a time can do.
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Todd Compton Independent historian - livingAuthor of In Sacred Loneliness. His subject is Joseph Smith's wives, not Brigham Young's — he is the model for what is being asked for here rather than a scholar of this subject.
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Brian C. Hales Independent historian - livingAuthor of Joseph Smith's Polygamy (3 vols) and builder of josephsmithspolygamy.org. Again, Joseph Smith rather than Brigham Young — the archive is the model this site is built on. Writes as a believing Latter-day Saint; how we differ.
Podcast episodes
Mormon Stories and the Brigham Young Podcast have covered this material at length. The Brigham Young Podcast works through Turner's biography chapter by chapter with Turner himself.
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The Brigham Young PodcastThe full series with John G. Turner, chapter by chapter through Pioneer Prophet. Chapter 5 is the Nauvoo marriages.
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Mormon Stories PodcastTwo decades of interviews, many touching polygamy and its aftermath.
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Year of PolygamyLindsay Hansen Park's series on the wives of Joseph Smith and the broader history of Mormon polygamy. The model for the podcast this site is asking someone to make.
Read the sources yourself
Everything in this block is online and was checked on the build date at the foot of this page. Where a publisher's own page could not be verified, the link goes to a copy that could - a guessed publisher URL is worse than no link at all.
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Journal of Discourses, 26 volumes (1854-1886) Complete, free, volume by volume on the Internet Archive
Roughly 14,000 pages of Brigham Young-era sermons, including nearly everything on the quotes page. Published 1854-1886 and long out of copyright, so read it free: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16 · 17 · 18 · 19 · 20 · 21 · 22 · 23 · 24 · 25 · 26. The modern scholarly edition, with apparatus, is The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young edited by Richard S. Van Wagoner, five volumes - buy that one.
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Johnson's Table 1, the list this whole site rests on Dialogue - A Journal of Mormon Thought 20:3 (Fall 1987)
in full. If you read one thing from this page, read this.
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Journal of Mormon History - the complete open-access run, 1974-2014 Utah State University Digital Commons
Eighty issues, every one free. Stapley on adoption is in vol. 37 no. 3; Marquardt on Emily Dow Partridge in vol. 34 no. 3.
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BYU Studies - the archive
Derr on Brigham Young and Eliza R. Snow is in vol. 40 no. 2.
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Wife No. 19 (1875), complete Ann Eliza Young
The only full-length published autobiography by any of the fifty-five, and a hostile one. Why that matters.
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The Church's own account of sealing
Including the 1894 revelation that ended adoption sealings. Where this site's reading differs, it says so rather than implying agreement.
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Church History Catalog
The finding aid for the Brigham Young office files and the Nauvoo ordinance records. Start here if you are doing original research.
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The Joseph Smith Papers
The documentary edition, free and complete, for the Nauvoo period and the 1843 revelation.
Archives and databases
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Church History Library, Salt Lake City
Holds the Brigham Young office files and the Nauvoo ordinance records.
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Dialogue - A Journal of Mormon Thought
Johnson's 1987 article and table are in the Dialogue archive.
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The Joseph Smith Papers
For the Nauvoo period and the 1843 revelation.
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Internet Archive
Public-domain scans of Wife No. 19, the Journal of Discourses and much else.
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FamilySearch
Genealogical records for most of the fifty-five. We have not yet linked person ids from here; doing so is on the list.
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Find a Grave
Burial records and, for many of these women, the only photograph in circulation. Also not yet linked here.
Works cited, in full
Source lines across this site use short forms — Johnson Table 1, Turner p. 134, Quinn App. 6. Here is what each one is, with somewhere to buy or read it. The build refuses to publish a source line that does not name one of these.
Buy them from the publisher. Several of the books this site depends on most are Signature Books titles, and a small independent press publishing this material deserves the sale more than a marketplace does. If you use this site, buy the books it is built on.
Where a work is out of copyright, we say so and link a free copy. Anything published in or before 1930 is in the public domain, and the nineteenth-century sources this site rests on — the Journal of Discourses, Wife No. 19, Jenson's Church Chronology — are free to read in full. Books still in copyright get a purchase link only, even where a scan exists somewhere. Journal articles are linked to their own publisher's archive, which is the publisher's choice to make, not ours.
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Johnson
Jeffery Ogden Johnson, "Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households", Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20:3 (Fall 1987), 57-70. Table 1 is the only comprehensive published list of the fifty-five, and is the backbone of this site.
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Turner
John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). The standard modern biography. Page numbers refer to this edition; chapter references are given where we have not checked a page.
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Quinn
D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), Appendix 6. Quinn's list keeps Maria Lawrence and so reaches fifty-six.
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Compton
Todd M. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). Cited here for the women sealed to Joseph Smith before Brigham Young.
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Brown
Lisle G. Brown, Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings: A Comprehensive Register of Persons Receiving LDS Temple Ordinances, 1841-1846 (Smith-Pettit Foundation, distributed by Signature Books, 2006). Used to check who received which ordinance on which day.
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Stapley
Jonathan A. Stapley, "Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism", Journal of Mormon History 37:3 (Summer 2011), 53-117. The source for the whole dynastic-sealings section, including Table 1.
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Ulrich
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).
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Hales
Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), and the companion archive at josephsmithspolygamy.org.
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Journal of Discourses
Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, 1854-1886). Cited by volume and page. The run ends at volume 26 in 1886; anything citing a later volume is citing something else.
The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, Signature Books · Read free — vol. 1 of 26, 1854-1886
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Walker, Turley and Leonard
Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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Bradley and Woodward
Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mormon Women (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000); and their article in Journal of Mormon History 20:1.
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Derr, Beecher and Cannon
Jill Mulvay Derr, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Janath Russell Cannon, Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992).
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Bergera
Gary James Bergera, in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38:3.
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Marquardt
H. Michael Marquardt, in Journal of Mormon History 34:3.
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O'Donovan
Connell O'Donovan, in Journal of Mormon History 38:2.
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Tanner
Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Joseph Smith and Polygamy (Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1967). A hostile source, cited only where it reproduces a document.
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Crawley
Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church, 3 vols. (Provo: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University).
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Young, Wife No. 19
Ann Eliza Young, Wife No. 19, or The Story of a Life in Bondage (Hartford: Dustin, Gilman & Co., 1875). Her own account, written to destroy him, and the only book-length first-person account by any of the fifty-five.
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RSC
Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University - reference works published online, including the Brigham Young chronology and the Journey West glossary.
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BYU Studies
BYU Studies Quarterly, Brigham Young University. Free archive.
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Official Declaration 1
Official Declaration 1 (the Manifesto), 25 September 1890, canonised in the Doctrine and Covenants.
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Statutes and cases
Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, 12 Stat. 501 (1862); Poland Act, 18 Stat. 253 (1874); Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1879); Edmunds Act, 22 Stat. 30 (1882); Edmunds-Tucker Act, 24 Stat. 635 (1887). Cited by their formal citations so they can be looked up directly.
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Contemporary minutes
Contemporary minutes and manuscript records reproduced in the B. H. Roberts Foundation archive, which publishes transcriptions of early Latter-day Saint documents with their repository references.
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Quinn, Dialogue 18:1
D. Michael Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904", Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18:1 (Spring 1985).
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Church History Topics
"Sealing" and related entries, Church History Topics, published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The church's own account, cited where the site reports what it says rather than endorsing it.
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Teachings of Presidents
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1997), and the companion Joseph F. Smith volume (1998). The manuals, cited for what they say and for what they leave out.
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Jenson
Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology: A Record of Important Events (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1899), and his Historical Record. Jenson was Assistant Church Historian; his compilations are a standard nineteenth-century reference and a primary source in their own right.