What is the purpose of this project?
This project seeks to answer 2 questions for people:
- Did polygamy exist in our families?
- What did plural families look like during that time?
These questions are hard to answer, and the tool is highly dependent on family research conducted previously. It does however, identify polygamous relationships, assuming dates for births, deaths, marriages, and divorces are accurate. Polygamy is such an uncommon thing for people these days, that it's hard to conceptualize what was like to have a household with multiple mothers/wives and how the shape of that family progressed over time.
where to source my family tree?
I recommend familySearch because members of the LDS Church have been diligent at documenting these plural families. However, you cannot export your tree for this tool to read. The workaround is to export it to ancestry.com and then download the tree as a gedcom file. Note that you will only get the first 4 generations into ancestry. So you may need to review some of their hints.
I'm lost about polygamy and why we want to know about families in the Mormonism movement
There's a lot to unpack here. Joseph Smith was leader of the Mormonism movement, or popularly known as the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church, aka the Mormons). He started the church in 1830 and within a few years, introduced the concept of polygamy as a required institution for salvation in heaven–specifically that a man should have multiple wives. There is definitely more to it than that, and I am generalizing it quite a bit, but the takeaway is that the Mormon people had to reconcile their entire lives with this practice, so many families adopted the practice. So to put it simply, many Mormon families had one husband and multiple wives.
Are you against polygamy?
While I'm only familiar with polygamy during the Mormon movement, it exists all over the world. I do not practice it or know anyone personally who does. I am just seeking to understand my family history around it and offer the opportunity to others. Women are equal to men, and I condemn ideologies and practices to the contrary.
Who is your audience then?
I think Mormon Polygamy has been a fascination of the country for a long, long time. I hope everyone feels comfortable using this tool, from members of the LDS Church, to plural-family fundamentalists, to Mormon history aficionados.
How do timelines reveal what life was like for plural families?
Timelines help depict the shape of these families over time, like when there were concurrent wives, how many men practiced, if there were prior or subsequent marriages, if children resulted from all marriages, and the age gaps between husbands, wives, and step-families.
Have you found anything noteworthy using these timelines?
- Most polygamous men had at least 3 wives.
- Of my male Mormon ancestors who were eligible to practice polygamy, 40% did practice it.
- Not all women stayed with their polygamous husband until their deaths. This has led me to journals and family stories about how this practice challenged the women who participated. This has been a very fascinating aspect to this project
I want to hear more about you and your experience with this project
see the about page