About

About this site

Brigham Young was sealed or married to fifty-five women. There is no book about them. There is one published list, made in 1987, and it is a table.

This site exists to make that list usable — to give every one of the fifty-five a page, to set the marriages against the life that produced them, to define the vocabulary the sources use, and, the part that matters most, to mark clearly and repeatedly where the record runs out. The blanks here are not failures of research. They are the finding.

Where the material comes from

The spine is Jeffery Ogden Johnson, "Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households", Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20:3 (Fall 1987), Table 1 — still the only comprehensive published list. Layered on top of it:

**John G. Turner, *Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet*** (Harvard, 2012) — the standard modern biography, and the source of the polyandry counts.
D. Michael Quinn's appendices, for children counts and the will.
**Todd Compton, *In Sacred Loneliness*** for the women also sealed to Joseph Smith.
**Lisle G. Brown, *Nauvoo Sealings, Adoptions, and Anointings*** (Smith-Pettit, 2006) for who received which ordinance on which day.

Everything is on the resources page, and the whole table is published as a workbook, a CSV and JSON for anyone who wants to check it or build on it.

How it is built

Every page is generated from a single research table. Correct one cell and every page that uses it changes. No figure is typed twice, which is why the counts on the home page, the analysis page and the individual entries cannot drift apart — and why the build refuses to publish a count that disagrees with its source.

Three things this site will not do

It will not pick a winner where historians disagree. Turner counts about 53 wives, Johnson 55, Quinn 56. All three appear, with the reason each gives. Every disagreement is listed in full.

It will not fill a gap by inference. "Not established here" means exactly that — not zero, not no, not probably.

It will not tell you what to conclude. It is neither apologetic nor counter-apologetic, takes no position on whether any of this was inspired, and a believing reader should be able to finish every page on it. Where the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has published its own account of something, we link it rather than paraphrasing it.

Corrections

If a fact here is wrong, we want to fix the research table it came from, not just the page. Send the correction and the source to mormonstories@gmail.com and we will.

Who built this

Supplied by John Dehlin.

John Dehlin

Founder, Open Stories Foundation

Founder and host of Mormon Stories Podcast since 2005, and executive director of the Open Stories Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical and counseling psychology from Utah State University.

He built this site because he kept asking guests on the Brigham Young Podcast for the equivalent of Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness for Brigham Young's wives, and kept being told it does not exist. Rather than wait for someone else to write it, he put the research table online and asked for help.

mormonstories.org

From his George Mason University faculty page, used with his permission.

John G. Turner not yet approached

Historian, George Mason University

Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University and author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012) — the standard modern biography, and the book this site leans on most heavily after Johnson's table. He has also written The Mormon Jesus (2016) and Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (Yale, 2025).

Pioneer Prophet has no appendix of wives and prints no list; its only published roster is endnote 56, naming the fifteen women who were legally married to other men. That gap is a large part of why this site was built, and it is not a criticism of the book — a biography is not a reference work, and nobody has written the reference work. He is a frequent guest on the Brigham Young Podcast, which works through the biography chapter by chapter.

George Mason University faculty page · Brigham Young Podcast

From Open Stories Foundation episode artwork for Mormon Stories Ep. 1983.

Barbara Jones Brown not yet approached

Historian

Historian and co-author of Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, and herself a descendant of people involved in the massacre.

Mountain Meadows is not a side story to this site. John D. Lee, the only man executed for it, was adopted into Brigham Young's family under the law of adoption in January 1846 — the same six weeks in which nineteen of these fifty-five women were sealed to him. The rituals that built the household and the network that produced the massacre are the same rituals.

Mormon Stories Ep. 1983

From Open Stories Foundation episode artwork for Mormon Stories Ep. 1996.

Michelle Stone not yet approached

Researcher, 132 Problems; graduate student, Arizona State University

Creator of 132 Problems: Revisiting Mormon Polygamy, a YouTube channel with about 116,000 subscribers, and now a graduate student at Arizona State University. A lifelong Latter-day Saint who once believed plural marriage was divinely instituted, she began studying the records ten years ago in order to answer her husband's doubts — and came out the other side arguing that Joseph Smith did not practise polygamy at all.

Her position is a minority one, and this site does not hold it. Most historians, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself, accept that Joseph Smith practised plural marriage. But her argument matters here more than almost anywhere else, because if she is right the practice begins with Brigham Young — which makes the fifty-five women on this site the origin of the whole thing rather than its second chapter. She argues that case in public, at length, against people who disagree with her, and it is worth hearing her make it rather than hearing it described.

Read her, and read Todd Compton, Brian Hales and John Turner on the other side. This site cites the mainstream account throughout and says so.

132 Problems: Revisiting Mormon Polygamy · Mormon Stories Ep. 1996 · Mormon Stories Ep. 2124

From Open Stories Foundation episode artwork for "Mormon Polygamy Under Brigham Young", where he is named.

Bryan Buchanan not yet approached

Benchmark Books; co-host, Sunstone History Podcast

Co-host of the Sunstone History Podcast and on the staff of Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City. His work sits directly on top of this subject: the evolving history of Latter-day Saint sealings, the second anointing, the William Clayton diaries, and John Taylor's 1886 revelation. A frequent guest on LDS Discussions and Mormon Stories.

His argument that early sealings created dynastic networks and systems of authority rather than the modern "eternal family" is the same reading this site's doctrine page takes of the law of adoption, and he has worked through the primary registers in a way almost nobody else has.

The Messy History of Mormon Sealings · Mormon Polygamy Under Brigham Young · A History of the LDS Second Anointing

From one of her own videos, used with her permission.

Julia not yet approached

Host, Analyzing Mormonism

Host of Analyzing Mormonism, which examines the life of Joseph Smith and the teachings of the church from the sources. A BYU-Idaho graduate and returned missionary, she is a history master's student at Missouri State University and a regular panelist on LDS Discussions.

Her work on the documentary record of Nauvoo overlaps directly with the first four marriages on this site — the ones Joseph Smith lived to see.

analyzingmormonism.com

Corporate and non-profit sponsors we would like to approach

Mormon Stories Podcast not yet approached

The Open Stories Foundation already publishes this site, and the Brigham Young Podcast is where the question that started it was first asked out loud.
Signature Books not yet approached

Publisher of Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness, of Quinn's hierarchy volumes and of Lisle Brown's Nauvoo register - three of the four books this site rests on.
Benchmark Books not yet approached

Salt Lake City's specialist Mormon-history bookseller, and the shop most likely to know where an unpublished diary or family history has ended up.
Sunstone Education Foundation not yet approached

Publisher of Sunstone and host of the Sunstone symposium, the venue where a great deal of this scholarship was first argued in public — and where Bryan Buchanan co-hosts the Sunstone History Podcast.

Whose project this should be

This site is published by the Open Stories Foundation, the secular non-profit behind Mormon Stories — but it is not meant to stay an Open Stories project, and it should not be one.

The work these fifty-five women need is bigger than any one organisation, and most of the people who can actually do it do not work for us. It wants Signature Books and Benchmark Books, who between them published and sell nearly every book this site rests on. It wants John G. Turner, whose biography is the backbone of the modern account, and historians like him. It wants the Sunstone Education Foundation, where much of this scholarship was first argued out loud. It wants archivists, genealogists, descendants holding letters nobody has read, and a publisher willing to print the result.

So the hope is a collaboration — Signature, Benchmark, Sunstone, Open Stories and Mormon Stories, Turner and other historians, and anyone else who wants the book, the podcast and the research archive to exist. We will hand over the table, the code and the domain names to a better home the day a better home appears. Nothing here is proprietary: the whole dataset is published for anyone to take and use.

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