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In light of the updated LDS Church policy regarding same gender unions and children raised by same gender couples, I was struck by what Joseph Smith did in Nauvoo in the case of Parley P. Pratt and Mary Ann Frost [Stearns Pratt].

Parley was a widower, having previously been married to the then-deceased Thankful Halsey, a widow herself when she married Parley. Mary Ann Frost was a widow who had greatly loved her first husband.

In 1843 Hyrum Smith performed a ceremony sealing Parley to Mary Ann. As soon as Joseph learned what Hyrum had done, he annulled the sealing. Continue reading Mormon Marriage: Use Cases

There are at least two men who became public husbands of women who were sealed to Joseph Smith in the 1840s.

The first and most well-known of these was Joseph C. Kingsbury, who documented that “on the 29th of April 1843 I according to President Joseph Smith council & others agread to Stand by Sarah Ann Whitney as supposed to be her husband and had a pretended marriage…”^[1]

The second and almost entirely unknown of these was Jonathan Harriman Holmes, who in the 1860s told his children and friends that his wife, Elvira Annie Cowles, had first been the wife of Joseph Smith, that he, Jonathan, had agreed to be her husband after Joseph’s death if she wished it. When taken together with the fact that Joseph Smith performed the December 1842 ceremony wedding Jonathan Holmes to Elvira Annie Cowles, the December 1842 marriage can be seen as a pretended marriage, like that of Joseph C. Kingsbury to Sarah Ann Whitney.^[2]

Both Kingsbury and Holmes were widowers. In each case, the man was subsequently sealed to the bride of his youth in the Nauvoo temple. It is clear in the case of Kingsbury that the promise of being sealed to his wife and someday reunited with his dead children was convolved in his willingness to be a pretended husband to Sarah Ann Whitney. Continue reading The Pretend Husbands

1. ^[1]Joseph C. Kingsbury journal, page 13, apparently recorded after August 1848, available online via http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/JCKingsbury.html.↩
2. ^[2]See the statement William Wright provided to Church headquarters in the early 1900s (contained in Brian Hales’ Joseph Smith’s Polygamy) and Jonathan’s reported statement to his own children as documented in the Job Welling family history, available online at familysearch.org under books.↩

I have the privilege in participating in a book group. This month’s selection was The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective.

The story of the shocking murder is laid before the reader: a three-year-old boy, Saville Kent, turns up missing in June 1860. His body is found in the servants’ privy, having been murdered.

The local police force, largely composed of unpaid local volunteers, fails to determine who committed the crime after two weeks. Mr. Whicher, the most reknowned of Scotland Yard’s eight detectives, is sent to solve the disturbing case. John Whicher almost immediately comes to his conclusions: the murder was committed by individuals living in the Kent household in Road Hill, and the most likely suspects are the murdered boy’s half-siblings, teenagers Constance and William Kent. Mr. Whicher only has physical evidence to support accusations against Constance, and that is circumstantial.

The spectacle of a working class man sifting through the family’s soiled laundry to accuse a respectable middle class maiden of brutally killing her younger brother causes country-wide revulsion. Mr. Whicher’s career is destroyed, though he is able to find work as a private detective a few years later, when Constance Kent confesses to being solely responsible for the murder. Constance spends 20 years in jail.

William, freed from suspicion by his sister’s testimony, is able to inherit the thousand pounds his deceased mother had bequeathed to him upon his majority and goes on to enjoy a successful career in science. Once Constance is released, she changes her name and spends the rest of her life with or near her brother, William.

This one murder case has a profound impact on the zeitgeist of the age, manifested in the new genre of detective fiction. It popularized conlusions that had been arrived at decades earlier by those involved in the judicial system: human witness (confession or eyewitness evidence) was too subjective to be trusted. As early as 1825, Jeremy Bentham’s A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825) argued that testimony needed to be backed up by material proof.

Yet when it comes to matters relating to the emergence of the central doctrines regarding marriage in Mormonism, the vast majority are content to hang their interpretation on the testimony of human witnesses, ignoring the capacity of these witnesses to mislead, whether intentionally or not. Continue reading A Woman’s Testimony: The Road Hill House Murder

I was delighted to see a formal response from Laura and Brian Hales regarding my writings about Joseph Smith and others who lived in Nauvoo in the 1840s.

Laura Hales’ Introduction

Laura did not engage me on details, and I agree with most of the points she makes. I agree that if one is obsessing about things that damage faith, that “immersing oneself in persistent doubt, fueled by answers from the faithless and the unfaithful, weakens one’s faith.” Continue reading Commentary on the Hales’ Critiques

Bottom Line Up Front: Weather and possibility of an American-born John “McIlwrick” suggest Martha Brotherton’s interview with Brigham Young occurred well before January 1842.

The other day I explained what I think happened between Brigham Young and Martha Brotherton. My thesis was that Martha’s encounter with Brigham occurred prior to January 1842, before we have a positive indication that Joseph Smith had included Brigham in ceremonies related to the New and Everlasting Covenant. The July 1842 letter describing Martha’s alleged ordeal appears to pin the incident as occurring in February-March 1842, when William Clayton was working in the tithing office and prior to the April 7th denunciation of the tale during General Conference.^[1]

I tried in vain to locate a direct reference to the arrival of the Brothertons in the vicinity of Nauvoo, Illinois. But we know that Mary Brotherton (born 1819) had married a John McIlwrick. John and Mary would join Martha’s other sister, Elizabeth, in denouncing Martha as “a deliberate liar;” as “a wilful inventor of lies;” and a circulator of “lies of a base kind, concerning those whom she knew to be innocent.” These family members also accuse Martha as acting outside of “common decency,” by “lying on the top of a young man when he was in bed,” etc.^[2]

Perhaps, I thought, I could find when John McIlwrick arrived in the United States and thus pinpoint when the Martha Brotherton episode could have occurred. Continue reading Who was John McIlwrick?

1. ^[1]Apr. 15, 1842 issue of the Times and Seasons, p. 763, reporting on the Thursday, Apr. 7, 1842, spring conference in Nauvoo. Hyrum Smith “spoke concerning the elders who went forth to preach from Kirtland… [and] then spoke in contradiction of a report in circulation about Elder Kimball, B. Young, himself, and others of the Twelve, alleging that a sister had been shut in a room for several days, and that they had endeavored to induce her to believe in having two wives.” Available online at http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/utils/getdownloaditem/collection/NCMP1820-1846/id/9835/filename/4927.pdf/. Note that the conference refutation only indicates apostles have been implicated. Joseph Smith himself was not defended, indicating the original rumor had not included Joseph himself.↩
2. ^[2]Nauvoo Wasp broadside “extra” of Aug. 31, 1842.↩

Bottom Line Up Front: Brigham Young accomplished a great work, defeating spiritual wifery. But he did his work so thoroughly that it has been difficult for later generations to comprehend what was going on.

In my recent post about giving Joseph Smith a break, there were those who asked for a similar discussion of Brigham Young.

In my “Faithful Joseph” construct, I argue Joseph Smith and his righteous followers predominantly refrained from consummating plural marriages prior to Joseph’s death. If true, then what happened under Brigham’s leadership? There is no question that plural marriages were widely consummated after Brigham Young assumed leadership of the Mormon Church. Continue reading Give Brigham Young a Break

I was ill earlier this week, so took the opportunity to listen to the Priesthood Session of General Conference. I was particularly heartened by Elder Anderson’s confident advice to “give Brother Joseph a break.”

The theme of the Conference was a call to believe, with many suggestions on how belief could be strengthened. For some, however, it helps to quiet the mocking voices in their heads to provide a plausible alternative to the popular bogeyman of the non-believers, the Joseph as narcissistic imposter who allegedly made up scripture from whole cloth and took dozens of his followers’ daughters and wives to his bed.

First, A Picture

In 1969 a family donated a daguerreotype to the RLDS Church (now the Community of Christ). They claimed it was a picture of Joseph Smith. If it is Joseph, the youth and gaunt look of the man in the image indicate the photo was taken in late 1839. In November-December 1839 Joseph took a trip to Washington D.C. to seek redress for the atrocities perpetuated against the Mormons in Missouri. Due to Joseph’s notoriety, it is reasonable an early daguerreotypist in DC would have sought to capture his likeness.

Rick Brunson has a brief article on his blog describing the evidences Shannon Michael Tracy documents in his book, Millions Shall Know Brother Joseph Again. In summary, this daguerreotype allegedly matches the death mask using both lineal matching and facial recognition techniques. The image also corresponds with photos taken of Joseph’s skull prior to the remains being reinterred during the early 1900s.

[Updated 10/11/15: There was apparently a storm of controversy about this image and the Tracy book in 2008. One disappointed summary can be found at Juvenile Instructor. When I scanned that article, it appears the author went from hoping this was an image of Joseph Smith to being completely angered by the unprofessionalism of Mr. Tracy. In my reading of this summary, I missed whether the picture had been proven to be not of Joseph. For the record, I was intrigued by seeing this image illustrating a post from a reputable blogger, with the text indicating that they hoped this was an actual image of Joseph Smith. Searching things more, I happened upon the Brunson blog.]

Continue reading Give Joseph Smith a Break

In October 1845, during the height of the Mormon persecutions in Illinois, four of the nine members of the DeLong family died. The DeLongs were impoverished converts who arrived in Nauvoo in time to join the lines to view the dead bodies of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. After the parents and two children died, the rest were scattered. Of these, only one ended up traveling west as far as Utah. That four-year-old in a red flannel diaper and a straw hat would go on to be one of the first settlers of Panguitch, Utah.

I had heard as a youngling about how a neighbor had provided blueberries, from which Mother DeLong prepared a pie. But most of the children refused to eat the pie. Those who did, both parents and one son, all died of ague, violent illness. Mother DeLong gave birth the day her son and husband died, and both she and the new infant died soon thereafter.

The problem with the story was that blueberries have a very short season: in Illinois they are only available in July and August. Other members of the extended family criticized the oral history from the surviving family members because it didn’t agree with written records from this terrible time and the fact that Mother DeLong didn’t die the same day as her husband and son.

My personal experience as a pregnant mother taking lethal levels of drugs (in my case to treat the heart condition of my unborn son) helped me understand why a poison migh induce labor but not immediately kill.

That left only the identification of poisonous blue berries that could be mistaken for blueberries in early October in Illinois. I have been searching for a possible candidate berry for over a decade. Continue reading The Deaths of the DeLongs: Searching for Blue Berries

The other day I was in Charlottesville with my husband, celebrating our wedding anniversary. We had good food, had fun shopping, and then we ran into the perfect people.

Missionaries!

Amid evening twinkle lights, street musicians, and folks dining al fresco, these enthusiastic folks were having a gerat time, giving out free lemonade and telling people that Families can be Forever.

Last night I had a chance to sit in on a lecture about how we use DNA to discover whether or not we are right when we are forming out family tree. As my friend talked about the research that led them to confirm two individuals were brother, and then to determine that their ancestor, Evey, was the daughter of a family that had somehow failed to document her (insufficient 1800 census and mother who wasn’t at home when she gave birth to that daughter), I was caught up in the excitement of trying to determine the answer. And I felt an echo of the excitement my friend must have felt after all the hundreds of hours of research, seemingly confirmed by DNA, when finally a letter was found, where some chatty relative had taken the time to list what had happened to all the siblings – and this one document, of all the extensive research on this 1800s family, finally listed Evey as the second child in the family and told of her marriage and children. Continue reading Families Can Be Together Forever

After book group this Tuesday, one of my friends mentioned she’d been reading about the various presidents of Relief Society. Knowing of my interest in early Mormon polygamy, my friend said she wanted to talk with me sometime about Zina Diantha Huntington [Jacobs Smith Young], who served as General Relief Society President after the death of Eliza R. Snow.

Zina was one of the first women to covenant with Joseph Smith, one of the few who was told Joseph had only acted because an angel threatened him with a sword. According to other accounts, the angel had appeared to Joseph repeatedly since 1834, but it would only be in 1841 that the angel implied lethal force might occur if obedience to the commandment was not forthcoming.

Following the 1844 death of Joseph Smith, Zina would undergo a uniquely unusual marital shift, leaving the ostensibly faithful/believing father of her children to become the conjugal wife of Brigham Young.

Here is my explanation for why a married and pregnant Zina entered into a covenant marriage with Joseph Smith, and why after Joseph’s death she abandoned her believing husband to become one of the many conjugal wives of Brigham Young. Continue reading Zina Diantha Huntington Young: Exploring a Confusing Legacy