How to use this tool
This tool scans your family tree for male ancestors who practiced polygamy. Your data stays in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
Where to start
You can jump in at one of these points:
- Upload a file — GEDCOM exported from FamilySearch, Ancestry, or another genealogy platform. A CSV feature is also available on the upload page.
- Build a chart by hand — Enter a patriarch and his wives directly without a file.
- Browse the gallery — Explore pre-built charts for well-documented historical figures.
How to read a chart
- The top row is the patriarch. His bars show each marriage stacked over his lifespan — overlapping bars mark a polygamous interval.
- The remaining rows are his wives. Each colored bar is her marriage to him. Hatched bars indicate a marriage to another man.
- Hover or click a barto see the marriage year, the wife's age at marriage, and any prior or subsequent partners.
- A shaded bandmarks the institutional plural marriage era: from 1833 — the earliest documented estimate for Joseph Smith's first plural union — through 6 April 1890, the date of the Woodruff Manifesto formally but ineffectively ending Church-sanctioned polygamy. The revelation canonizing plural marriage was recorded in 1843; the practice was publicly announced in 1852. josephsmithspolygamy.org provides detailed documentation of the primary sources underlying this timeline.
Common questions
How do you identify a polygamist?
Any man whose marriages overlap in time is flagged as polygamous. If the data includes a start and end date for each marriage, the tool checks whether two or more intervals are concurrent. If there is no end date, the husband's death is used as the end date.
Where should I get my family tree?
FamilySearch is the most comprehensive source for LDS lineages. Because FamilySearch does not offer a direct GEDCOM export, export your tree to Ancestry first, then download it as a GEDCOM file. Note that FamilySearch's export is limited to roughly four generations, so you may need to review record hints to fill in gaps.
Other sources you could use are AncestralQuest and WikiTree.
Is my data private?
Yes. The app runs entirely in your browser. No file contents or family data are transmitted to any server.
Why focus on the LDS movement?
The nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint movement institutionalized plural marriage as doctrine, which means the genealogical record for that period is unusually dense with polygamous households. That makes it the most productive starting point. Support for other traditions is on the roadmap.
For more questions, see the FAQ page
Some assumptions are made about marriage end dates — when a new marriage begins, a prior one is assumed to have ended. For a small group of figures close to Joseph Smith this assumption does not hold, as plural wives could remain married to earlier husbands simultaneously. The web version of this tool does not model that case.