A Family-History Study

What was it like to live in a plural family?

A tool for visualizing plural-marriage households in family-tree data. Upload a GEDCOM or enter a family by hand — everything runs in your browser.

Figure 01

An illustrative patriarch

Hover a row to inspect a wife's lifespan, age at marriage, and any prior partner.

Thomas Harlow18221891Margaret18271893Ruth18331895Clara18361902184018501860187018801890Mormon ExodusMountain Meadows Massacre1890 ManifestoSecond Manifesto184523 years old185129 years old185836 years old184518 years old185118 years old185822 years old1854prior husband

№ 002 — Method
i.

Bring your tree

Drop in a GEDCOM file from FamilySearch or Ancestry, or enter a family by hand. Files are parsed in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

ii.

Detect concurrent marriages

The tool scans for men with overlapping marriage intervals, then assembles a per-patriarch timeline of wives and lifespans.

iii.

Discover your ancestors

See the shape of each plural household at a glance — who was married when, how long it lasted, and where lives overlapped. Let the chart surface questions worth chasing.


№ 003 — Discovery

What will you uncover?

Charting a plural family pulls you closer to the ancestors inside it. You start to see what daily life looked like — how many households a man maintained, how young his wives were, how long those marriages lasted. Those details surface new questions, and new questions lead to journals, letters, and records you hadn't thought to look for.

Take Parley P. Pratt as a case study: his chart reveals a wife who divorced a prior husband to marry him, an age gap of nearly two decades across his wives, and a marriage that ran concurrently with Joseph Smith's own sealing to the same woman.


Gallery

Look at timelines from historical and public figures.

Visualize family life for figures whose plural households are widely discussed in history — from the founder of the Mormon Movement through to a modern fundamentalist offshoot.

Open the Gallery
Joseph Smith1805-1844
Brigham Young1801-1877
Parley P. Pratt1807-1857
Warren Jeffs1955