Wife-by-wife evidence register

The rule this register follows

Three different things are usually collapsed into one number, and this register refuses to collapse them.

1. A documented sealing means a surviving record naming the woman, the date, and usually the officiator.
2. Documented cohabitation means a witness stating that Joseph Smith and the woman lived or lodged together as husband and wife.
3. Evidence of sexual relations means a statement, by a participant or a direct witness, that sexual relations occurred.

A row may have the first without the second, and the second without the third. Nothing in this register is promoted from one column to the next by inference, and no column is totalled. A count of "wives" that silently mixes the three is the single most common error in the popular literature on both sides.

Every cell below reflects only sources actually opened and matched word for word. "None opened" does not mean no evidence exists. It means this project has not read it. That distinction is the whole point of the register, and it must not be softened when the article quotes from it.

The base list and why it is the base

Andrew Jenson's list of May 1887 is the earliest published compilation and the ancestor of every later reconstruction. Jenson introduces it this way:

Summing up the information received from the parties already mentioned and from other sources, we find that the following named ladies, besides a few others, about whom we have been unable to get all the necessary information, were sealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith during the last three years of his life.

Two weaknesses are visible in that sentence alone. Jenson admits the list is incomplete ("besides a few others"). And his frame — "during the last three years of his life," that is, 1841 to 1844 — does not fit two names he himself includes, Fanny Alger and Lucinda Harris, both of whom he calls among the first sealed, years earlier. A list whose own introduction contradicts two of its entries should not be treated as a register of record.

Source for every "documented sealing" cell and every Jenson quotation below: Andrew Jenson, ed., "Plural Marriage," The Historical Record 6 (May 1887), pages 219–234 and the biographical sketches following, read from the Internet Archive OCR of the Brigham Young University copy on 8 August 2026, de-hyphenated and matched word for word.

The register

What the register shows, stated exactly

Sealings. Jenson names twenty-seven women and says there were more he could not document. Eleven of the twenty-seven carry a specific day and month in his list; the other sixteen carry only a year or nothing at all. That is the actual precision of the earliest published list.

Cohabitation. Two rows carry a direct, named witness. Benjamin F. Johnson swore in 1870 that on 16 and 17 May 1843 Joseph Smith stayed at his house "lodging at my house with my sister as man and wife (and to my certain knowledge he occupied the same bed with her)." John Benbow swore in 1869 that Hannah Ells "boarded at his house two months during the summer of the same year" and that "President Smith frequently visited his wife Hannah at his (J. B's.) house." Four further rows are covered only by Lucy Walker's general statement about the four women Emma Smith consented to.

Sexual relations. Exactly one row in this register rests on a named eyewitness — Almera Johnson, on her own brother's oath. Lucy Walker's statement that Emma Smith "was well aware that he associated with them as wives within the meaning of all that word implies" covers the Partridge and Lawrence sisters as a group and is a claim about Emma's knowledge rather than a direct observation of the act. Emily Partridge testified under oath in 1892 that she had had sexual relations with Joseph Smith; that deposition was not opened for this draft, so the cell records the claim and its unopened status rather than treating it as established here.

Living husbands. This is the column where the popular literature is least careful and where this register is emptiest. Only one row — Ruth D. Vose, whom Jenson himself describes as "known as the wife of Edward Sayers" — can be filled from a source opened for this project. The Church's own Gospel Topics essay states that Joseph Smith "was sealed to a number of women who were already married" and gives no number. This project has therefore established no count of such sealings and does not offer one. Any figure a reader has seen — and figures between about eight and about fourteen circulate — comes from reconstructions this project has not audited.

Where historians disagree, and what this project can and cannot say

The article names four bodies of scholarship as the poles of the dispute: Richard Lyman Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling, Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness, Brian C. Hales's three-volume Joseph Smith's Polygamy, and Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery's Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith.

None of these four was opened for this draft. That is a real limitation and it is stated in the article as well as here. What follows is therefore a description of the shape of the dispute, not a citation of any of them, and a human must check each characterization against the books before this article is published.

• Compton is understood to treat a sealing as a marriage in the ordinary sense unless a specific reason appears to read it otherwise, on the reasoning that the later "eternity only" statements were given in Utah in a context that rewarded them.
• Hales is understood to argue that every sealing to an already-married woman was eternity-only and non-sexual, on the reasoning that no child has been traced to such a union, that several of the women said so, and that the first husbands did not complain.
• Bushman is understood to occupy a middle position, accepting the sealings as real marriages while declining to resolve their sexual character.
• Newell and Avery are understood to centre the account on Emma Smith and to read the sequence as far more damaging to her than the institutional histories allow.

The methodological point the article does make, and can make without opening any of the four, is symmetrical and stands on the register above: the evidence for sexual relations in the already-married cases is absent, not negative. Both the strongest faithful reading and the strongest critical reading are arguments from silence about a practice that was deliberately concealed and whose participants were asked to keep it confidential. Silence does not favour either of them.

Antebellum marriage age

The article states that the average American woman of the 1840s married in her early twenties and that marriage at fourteen sat far out on the young tail of the distribution. No demographic study was opened for this draft to support that statement, and the article's wording should not be strengthened beyond it until one is. What is verified is only what the Church's own essay says: that marriage at Helen Mar Kimball's age was "legal in that era, and some women married in their mid-teens," and that Helen was sealed "several months before her 15th birthday." A human should add a sourced median or mean age from a demographic history, or the article should drop the comparison.

Utah-period demography

The figures the article uses are the Church's own, from the Gospel Topics essay "Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah," verified word for word: about half of those living in Utah Territory in 1857 experienced life in a polygamous family at some time; 25 to 30 percent of the population lived in polygamous households by 1870, a percentage that continued to fall over the next twenty years; and "two-thirds of polygamist men had only two wives at a time." The underlying demographic studies the essay draws on were not opened.

Post-Manifesto marriages

From the Gospel Topics essay "The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage," verified word for word: a ledger of "marriages and sealings performed outside the temple," which the essay says "is not comprehensive," lists 315 marriages between 17 October 1890 and 8 September 1903, of which "research indicates that 25 (7.9%) were plural marriages and 290 were monogamous marriages (92.1%)." The essay adds that "the precise number of new plural marriages performed during these years, inside and outside the United States, is unknown," that "the exact process by which these marriages were approved remains unclear," and that "for a time, post-Manifesto plural marriages required the approval of a member of the First Presidency."

Open questions for a human

1. Open Compton, Hales, Bushman, and Newell and Avery and replace the four characterizations above with sourced positions and page numbers.
2. Open H. Michael Marquardt's edition of the 1892 Temple Lot deposition in the Journal of Mormon History and fill the Emily Partridge cell properly.
3. Open the Oliver Cowdery letter to Warren A. Cowdery of 21 January 1838 in the Cowdery Letterbook at the Huntington Library, which is the source of the "dirty, nasty, filthy affair" phrase the article currently declines to quote.
4. Find a demographic source for antebellum marriage age, or cut the comparison.
5. Establish, from primary records rather than from a secondary count, which women on Jenson's list had living husbands at the date of sealing. Until that is done the article must continue to refuse a number.