Polygamy, 1830–1844 — and the distance between an event and the paper that attests it
Hero image is a generated illustration, not a facsimile of any historical document.
The documentary record in two lanes — what was said publicly, and what was written privately — with every entry graded by when the evidence for it was actually created. Sources are graded, not adopted.
Work in progress. Evidence grades change as documents are checked — see the note at the foot of this page.
New, 30 August 2026. A graded section on the sexual-relations evidence — Was it conjugal? — on the alleged sealings view, with its own filter and per-woman sources
Three things are encoded at once. Colour is the lane. Shape is what the entry does to the question: a circle supports the practice, a square denies or contradicts it, a diamond is context that points neither way. Fill density and the numeral are the source grade — grade 1 is a surviving contemporaneous manuscript or imprint; grade 4 is a sworn recollection given 25–50 years later.
The shaded band at the right is the attestation window, 1869–1892, when most of the evidence about 1841–1843 was first written down. The hairlines running back from it show which entries it generated.
Two things to try. Press Grade 1 only — what remains is the entire contemporaneous documentary basis for the period. Then switch off Denies and Context: the circles still standing at grade 1 are every contemporaneous document that positively supports the practice, and you can count them.
Every entry is plotted twice: a filled marker at the date the event is said to have happened, and a ring at the date of the earliest surviving document that attests it. The line between them is the gap. Extra rings are later attesting sources.
An entry with no line is attested by a document written at the time. The long lines are events we know about only because somebody wrote them down decades afterwards.
What this does not measure: truth. A contemporaneous denial can be a lie, and a recollection given thirty years later can be accurate. This chart measures evidentiary distance — how far the record sits from the event — and nothing else. The 26 May 1844 denial is the test case: it is a Lane A denial with an eleven-year gap, and the chart is not rigged to spare it.
Click any row for the source detail · the dotted continuation marks later sources for the same claim
Every woman named as a plural wife of Joseph Smith on the standard historians' rosters — 35 on Brian Hales's list, 33 on Todd Compton's. The filled marker is the claimed sealing date. The line runs right to the 1869–1892 attestation window, because that is where the date comes from.
The count itself is unsettled. Jenson published 27 in 1887; Compton says 33; Hales says 35; the Church's own essay declines to give a number and cites "between 30 and 40." Across all published compilers the range runs from 26 to 52. A chart of this cannot be more precise than the field is, and this one is drawn from Hales's roster with Compton's disagreements marked.
The honest limit, stated plainly. An earliest-attestation date has now been established for 34 of the 35 — the ring at the end of each line is that specific document, not the edge of a window. The one remaining line runs to the window's edge rather than to a false point. Where a date rests on a source that is itself inconsistent, the entry note says so.
Alleged sexual relations — ● asserted · ○ asserted but contested · — a statement points the other way · blank: nothing located. Click a name for the documents and the links.
Click any row for detail · ▲ marks a woman already married to another living man · the six rows at the foot have no established date at all · shape carries no meaning on this view — every entry here is an asserted sealing, so there is no direction to encode
Dates and ages follow Hales except where an entry notes Compton's disagreement. The two Joseph Smith Papers pages above were checked directly rather than taken on report.
Most arguments about Nauvoo run two questions together as though they were one. They are not, they rest on different documents, and they come out differently. Separating them is the single most useful thing this section does.
Rests on two surviving contemporaneous manuscripts — the Whitney letter of 18 August 1842 and William Clayton's journals — plus a substantial hostile record from 1842–44. Not seriously contested in academic history. The charts above are where that case is graded.
Rests on one contemporaneous document — an untried criminal accusation brought by two men who had just been excommunicated — plus sworn testimony created between 1870 and 1905, at a median distance of roughly forty-five years from the events. Materially thinner, and thin in a way that can be stated precisely.
Grade key, in brief. 1 contemporaneous manuscript, uncontested 2 contemporaneous but hostile or disputed 3 sworn, 5–25 years after 4 sworn, 25–50 years after 5 late, unsworn or secondhand. The full scale is on the timeline view.
A note on how this section was built, since it matters. It was assembled expecting the sexual evidence to collapse the way the Sarah Ann Whitney sealing revelation and the Kingsbury copy did when they were checked. It did not. What it did instead was sort cleanly by date — which is this project's recurring finding, and the one that holds whichever way the polygamy question breaks. The verdict at the foot of this section is two-sided on purpose.
The 1842–44 record on plural marriage is real and substantial. But it splits into two piles that are almost never kept apart: documents alleging a doctrine, and documents alleging sexual conduct with a specific named woman. On the second pile the list is very short.
| Document | Date | What it actually alleges | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carthage indictment State of Illinois v. JS for Adultery and Fornication |
24 May 1844 | The only contemporaneous government record naming a woman. JS “unlawfully then & there did live together in an open state of fornication and adultery with one Maria Lawrence, then of said County.” The three-page original manuscript survives at the Church History Library. But: the grand-jury testimony came from William and Wilson Law, both excommunicated the previous month, who published the Expositor two weeks later. The capias of 22 June was apparently never served; the case abated 21 October 1844 and never reached trial. An indictment is an accusation, not an adjudicated fact. JSP | 1 doc 2 ev |
| Nauvoo Expositor affidavits William Law, Jane Law, Austin Cowles |
sworn 4 May, printed 7 Jun 1844 |
Doctrine, not conduct — and this cuts against the popular critical treatment. All three swear only that Hyrum read them a written revelation authorising more wives than one. None alleges a sexual act by Joseph Smith. None names a woman. The seduction narrative appears only in the unsworn editorial preamble, which names nobody. text | 2 |
| John C. Bennett Sangamo Journal letters; History of the Saints |
8 Jul – 19 Aug 1842; book Nov 1842 | Alleges JS propositioned Sarah Pratt, Nancy Rigdon and Melissa Schindle, and constructs a “three degrees” seraglio scheme. Bennett was excommunicated for adultery on 11 May 1842 and wrote within eight weeks; on 17 May he had sworn JS “never taught him anything contrary to the strictest principles of the Gospel.” Bancroft called him a charlatan; his own biographer found four-fifths of the book recycled. And yet — writing in 1842, he correctly identified about five actual plural wives from partial names. He never mentions sealing for time and eternity. Accurate names, wrong theology: the signature of an outsider working from Nauvoo gossip. | 2 |
| Martha Brotherton affidavit | sworn 13 Jul 1842 | Alleges a marriage proposal by Brigham Young, endorsed by JS. No sexual conduct by JS is alleged. Impeached within six weeks by Nauvoo counter-affidavits — including one signed by her own sister Elizabeth. | 2 |
| “Happiness” letter to Nancy Rigdon |
printed 19 Aug 1842 | No original manuscript survives. The earliest text is Bennett's own printing. The Joseph Smith Papers places it in an appendix rather than among JS's documents because the authorship is uncertain; Sidney Rigdon said it was “by another person, and in another person's hand writing.” JSP | 2 |
| “Buckeye's Lamentation for Want of More Wives” Warsaw Message |
7 Feb 1844 | Anonymous satire — but it names, in code, women independently on every roster: “thoughtless Pa[r]tridges / Snow Birds or Knight engales.” A manuscript copy survives in the Joseph Smith Office Papers at the Church History Library. JSP | 2 |
| Sarah Pratt | 1842 via Bennett only; her own account 1886 |
In 1842 the allegation exists only second-hand through Bennett. The detailed, quotable Sarah Pratt narrative is from Wyl's Mormon Portraits, forty-four years later — and in between she told Joseph Smith III that JS “was never guilty of any action or proposal of improper nature” toward her. | 2 / 5 |
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Nothing in this tier is contemporaneous. The earliest item of any kind is 1870 — twenty-seven years after. Four items do real work; the rest are weaker than their reputation.
| Witness | Date of record | Lag | What it says | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emily Dow Partridge Temple Lot deposition, Templeton Hotel, Salt Lake City Part 3, p. 384 |
19 Mar 1892 | 49 yrs | The strongest single item in the file.
Q. “Did you ever have carnal intercourse with Joseph Smith?”
Earlier, asked who roomed with Joseph on the night of the ceremony: “Well I don't want to answer that question… Well it was myself.”A. “Yes sir.” Q. “How many nights?” A. “I could not tell you.” |
4 |
| Malissa Lott Willes Temple Lot deposition Part 3, pp. 97, 105–6 |
1892 exact day not established |
49 yrs | Q. “Did you ever room with Joseph Smith as his wife?” A. “Yes sir.” (the Nauvoo Mansion, room number one)
She also conceded flatly: “There was not any children born to you by Joseph Smith?” — “No Sir.”Q. “Well was it more than once?” A. “Yes sir, and more than twice.” Q. “Now at the times you roomed with him, did you cohabit with him as his wife?” A. “Yes sir.” |
4 |
| Benjamin F. Johnson affidavit — the earliest cohabitation claim in existence |
4 Mar 1870 | 27 yrs | Third-party observation, in his own house: JS “remained two days, lodging at my house with my sister as man and wife (and to my certain knowledge he occupied the same bed with her). This visit was on the 16th and 17th of May, 1843.” Note the drift across his four tellings: 16–17 May in 1870, 15 May in his 1903 letter, “summer of 1843” in 1897. | 4 |
| Almera Johnson Woodward affidavit |
1 Aug 1883 | 40 yrs | One of very few first-person, non-court statements by a wife using cohabitation language about herself: “After this time I lived with the Prophet Joseph as his wife.” Her brother had already sworn to the same fact in 1870, so this is not independent of the family's position, and it survives via Joseph Fielding Smith's 1905 polemic. | 4 |
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| Item | The problem | Grade |
|---|---|---|
| Joseph Bates Noble Temple Lot, 1892 |
A witness caught overstating sworn eyewitness knowledge. He testified of Joseph and Louisa Beaman: “I know it for I saw him in bed with her.” Pressed on cross as to whether he actually saw them get into bed: “No sir, for I was not there.” He then conceded Joseph had only told him afterward that he had taken Noble's advice to “blow out the light and get into bed,” and fell back on “Well, I am confident he did.” | 4 self-impeaching |
| Lucy Walker Temple Lot, 22 Mar 1892 |
Asked “Did you live with Joseph Smith as his wife?” she answered “He was my husband sir” — a different question. The Interpreter Foundation itself concedes the answer is “somewhat ambiguous.” Her court testimony does not establish sexual relations. Her 1902 affidavits do use cohabitation language — but about the Partridge and Lawrence sisters, not herself, and they surfaced in an anti-Mormon tract and in Joseph Fielding Smith's Blood Atonement. | 4 non-probative |
| Malissa Lott, “wife in very deed” | Widely miscited as sworn 1892 court testimony. It is not. It is a statement to Joseph Smith III of 4 August 1893, and the circulating version is a typescript dated 11 December 1949 made from a notarised statement then held privately by a descendant. | 4 / 5 |
| Sylvia Sessions via Josephine Lyon Fisher |
A 1915 affidavit reporting an 1882 deathbed statement about an 1843 conception — seventy-one years, with no document in Sylvia's own hand. For a century this was the strongest single case. The DNA has since excluded it — see below. | 4 superseded |
| Eliza R. Snow — the stairs and the miscarriage | Six versions exist. The earliest datable is 1876 and mentions neither stairs nor a miscarriage. The strong form — stairs, miscarriage, hip injury — is a four-hand chain, undated, first reaching print in Brodie, 1945, roughly a century after. The architecture of the buildings Joseph occupied in 1842 does not fit the story. The commonly repeated “her niece told it” and “Charles Walker recorded it” attributions could not be located at all. | 5 |
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| Witness | Date | Wording, and what it is worth |
|---|---|---|
| Zina D. H. Huntington Young interview with RLDS elder John W. Wight | 1 Oct 1898 printed 1905 |
The clearest “eternity only” self-correction on the roster. She first said “As his wife for time and eternity,” then corrected herself: “I meant for eternity.” Asked about being married to two men at once: “I do not wish to reply.” Weigh the setting: an adversarial interview designed to embarrass her, at 77, fifty-seven years after — and she died before it was printed. |
| Helen Mar Kimball Whitney autobiographical verse for her children | 30 Mar 1881 | “I thought through this life my time will be my own / The step I now am taking's for eternity alone.” Cited by the Church's own essay as suggesting no sexual relations. But it is poetry, thirty-eight years later, and “my time will be my own” reads at least as plausibly as a lament for forfeited youth. In all her writing she neither confirmed nor denied a physical relationship — and she was notably not called at Temple Lot when three others were. |
| Eliza R. Snow letter to Daniel Munns | 30 May 1877 | “I certainly shall not acknowledge myself to have been a carnal one.” Ambiguous, not a denial. She was answering the term “spiritual wife” — the Bennett-era pejorative — not necessarily the fact of intercourse. It should not be cited as either side's proof. |
| Emma Smith “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” interviewed by her son | interview Feb 1879, printed 1 Oct 1879 |
“He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have.” · “He did not have improper relations with any woman that ever came to my knowledge.” Read the construction. The polygamy denial is unqualified; the sexual-relations denial is twice qualified. And she died five months before publication, so she never reviewed the printed text — a fact that cuts both ways. |
| Angus M. Cannon statement of an interview with Joseph Smith III | 1905 | His explanation for the absence of children: “They were so nervous and lived in such constant fear that they could not conceive.” An apologetic rationalisation sixty-one years after — and it presupposes intercourse. The Eliza Snow “virgin” exchange in the same document is fourth-hand. |
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This is the most significant evidentiary development of the last twenty years, and it runs against the traditional narrative. It was also produced by a Latter-day Saint geneticist working with descendant families, not by a critic.
| Child | Mother (legal husband) | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Oliver N. Buell | Presendia Huntington Buell (Norman Buell) | Y-excluded. Brodie's flagship case, argued partly from photographic resemblance |
| Mosiah L. Hancock | Clarissa Reed Hancock (Levi Hancock) | Y-excluded |
| John Reed Hancock | Clarissa Reed Hancock (Levi Hancock) | Y-excluded (2011) — “a perfect match to all the other Hancock males” |
| Zebulon W. Jacobs | Zina Huntington Jacobs (Henry Jacobs) | Y-excluded. Zina was some seven months pregnant with him when sealed to Joseph |
| Moroni L. Pratt | Mary Ann Frost Pratt (Parley P. Pratt) | Y-excluded |
| Orrison Smith | Fanny Alger | Y-excluded |
| Josephine R. Lyon | Sylvia Sessions (Windsor Lyon) | Autosomally excluded (presented 2016, published 2019). Expected sharing if the paternity were real: ~106 cM. Observed: zero. Her grandson shares substantial DNA with four Lyon relatives instead |
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The Josephine Lyon result is the consequential one — it removed the one case that had affidavit evidence behind it. And note the reversal it produced: Brian Hales's 2008 article had argued for Joseph's paternity precisely because the conception fell inside Windsor Lyon's excommunication, which Hales read as marital separation. The genetics falsified a careful apologist's plausible circumstantial inference.
The structural limits, stated honestly. Roughly eleven to fourteen of about thirty-five sealings were to women with living husbands, where any child is attributed to the legal husband by default and never enters the candidate list. Most sealings fall inside a window from 1842 to June 1844. Several candidates are permanently untestable — Orson Washington Hyde died in infancy; Olive Gray Frost and her child both died in Nauvoo. And roughly thirty per cent of alleged cases are unresolvable on the geneticist's own estimate. One further caution: the contraception explanation that circulates online has no citable historian behind it and is not used here.
The Church's own Gospel Topics essay concedes the category and never asserts the act for any named woman:
| Scholar | Standing | Position |
|---|---|---|
| Brian C. Hales Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols., 2013 | MD, anesthesiologist — not a credentialed historian, but the most heavily documented researcher in the field, and the Church essay's own footnote source | “I have documented sexual relations in twelve of his non-polyandrous plural marriages with ambiguous evidence in three more.” Of the roughly fourteen sealings to women with living husbands: zero sexual |
| Todd Compton In Sacred Loneliness, 1997 | PhD, classics | Gives no tally. “In a significant number of marriages, there is evidence for sexual relations.” On individual polyandrous cases his inference is explicitly probabilistic |
| D. Michael Quinn MHA paper, 2012 — never peer-reviewed | Yale PhD; the most credentialed historian at the maximal position | Maximal, including the polyandrous marriages. His sharpest hit on Hales: “If the phrase ‘eternity only’ ever appeared in an original record of LDS sealing in the nineteenth century, I have not discovered it.” |
| Gary James Bergera | Independent scholar and editor | The polyandrous marriages were sexual — the direct opposite of Hales. Argues the wives had “compelling reason to avoid mention of legally adulterous sexual activity” |
| Richard Bushman Rough Stone Rolling, 2005 | Columbia emeritus; the mainstream anchor | Weaker than it is usually reported to be: “nothing indicates that sexual relations were left out of plural marriages.” That is an argument from the absence of evidence for non-sexuality, not positive proof |
| Lawrence Foster Religion and Sexuality, Oxford UP, 1981 | Credentialed academic historian | Accepts relations with “at least some,” but is “extremely dubious” of the polyandry category itself |
| Fawn Brodie No Man Knows My History, 1945 | — | Confident paternity claims — every candidate she named has since been excluded by DNA. The clearest documented case of a confident sexual-relations claim being falsified |
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1 · The sexual-relations evidence is materially weaker than its reputation, and weaker than the evidence for the practice itself. That is a real result, because popular treatments on both sides run the two together. One contemporaneous document bears on it directly, and that document is an untried accusation brought by two men who had just been excommunicated.
2 · But it is not flimsy in the sense of nonexistent. Four items carry real weight: Emily Partridge's sworn answer under hostile cross-examination, Malissa Lott's sworn cohabitation testimony, Benjamin Johnson's 1870 observation in his own house, and Almera Johnson's 1883 first-person statement. No witness recanted, and no plural wife ever denied consummation in her own words on the record.
3 · The dating problem is the honest argument — and it is this project's own thesis restated. Every specific claim of sexual relations was written down between 1870 and 1905, at a median distance of roughly forty-five years, by or in litigation on behalf of an institution with a doctrinal and legal stake in establishing that Joseph originated the practice. That does not make the claims false. It makes them grade 4.
4 · Where the traditional narrative has actually lost ground is the children — and it lost that ground to genetics rather than to argument. But neither the leading defender nor the geneticist who did the work will draw from it the inference that no relations occurred, and neither does this page.
Primary documents and scholarship consulted. Where a claim rests on a secondary transcription rather than the manuscript, this section says so in place.
Six things this section deliberately does not say, because they are repeated and wrong. That an Expositor affidavit described Joseph asking Jane Law to “give him half her love” — that is William Law in 1887, not 1844. That Malissa Lott said she was a wife “in very deed” under oath at Temple Lot — that is an 1893 statement surviving in a 1949 typescript. That Robert Foster brought a perjury charge over a sexual matter — the perjury indictment concerned a robbery allegation and had nothing to do with sex. That contraception explains the absence of children — no historian stands behind that. That “Don Alonzo Smith” is among the DNA-excluded sons — single-source and uncorroborated. And that the 507-page printed “Complainant's Abstract” of the Temple Lot case may be quoted as the trial record — it is a litigant's edit, and material appears in it that is absent from the original transcript.
Scroll sideways to move through time · click any entry for its source and grade · the axis is broken at 1845, and 1841–1845 is expanded because that is where the record is dense.
Almost everything written about Joseph Smith and plural marriage — on every side — rests on a surprisingly small number of surviving contemporaneous manuscripts: paper written at the time, by someone who was there, that still exists and can be examined. Recollections, affidavits and later histories are abundant. Manuscripts from the 1840s are not.
At the outset of this project, six documents looked like they carried the question. The exercise was simply to read each one's own source note at the Joseph Smith Papers and confirm it was what it was reputed to be. Four were not. None of this was uncovered by a critic or a defender — every correction below comes from the standard scholarly apparatus, mostly the Church's own Joseph Smith Papers project.
Each step is a round of checking, not a new discovery. The count fell because documents were read, not because anything was found.
| The document | What happened when it was checked |
|---|---|
| Nauvoo High Council minutes 12 Aug 1843 |
The minutes are silent. They record a meeting at Hyrum's office, no business, and teaching by Hyrum and Marks. The revelation is not mentioned. Everything about the reading comes from outside them — chiefly Austin Cowles, a hostile witness, ten months later. Silence is not suppression, but the event cannot be graded as documented by these minutes. |
| William Law's certification Nauvoo Expositor, 7 Jun 1844 |
Contemporaneous, but not a manuscript of the revelation — a printed assertion by a hostile party who had just been excommunicated. It was always grade 2. Counting it in the original six was loose bookkeeping on my part, and part of why the starting number was too high. |
| Sarah Ann Whitney sealing revelation 27 Jul 1842 |
No 1842 manuscript exists — in any hand. The earliest witnesses are two copies made in the 1870s by people nobody has identified. They disagree with each other on the wording, and both run a Whitney journal entry into the revelation text as though it were part of it. Plus a typescript from 1912. This was graded the strongest item in the set. It is now among the weakest. |
| Kingsbury copy of D&C 132 claimed 12–15 Jul 1843 |
The manuscript bears no date. There is no contemporaneous record of it being made; its date rests on affidavits of 1870, 1886 and 1892. It could have been written any time between 1843 and 1854. Not evidence of forgery — evidence that a date everyone repeats is not documented. |
| Letter to the Whitneys 18 Aug 1842 |
HOLDS. A genuine holograph in Joseph Smith's and William Clayton's hands, signed. Checked expecting it to fall; it didn't. But be precise: it never uses the words sealing, marriage or wife. The document is first-rate; the plural-marriage reading of it is inference. |
| William Clayton's journals 1842–1845 |
HOLDS, and now carries more weight than anything else. The entry of 12 July 1843 is contemporaneous, in Clayton's own hand, and — unlike Joseph's own journal for that day — it says what the revelation was about. |
The honest counterweight. Two surviving contemporaneous manuscripts is not zero. With them, the revelation is attested in Nauvoo while Joseph was alive. The attrition makes the evidentiary base narrower and better understood; it does not make it empty, and this chart should not be cited as though it did.
| Grade | Meaning | In this chart |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contemporaneous document, surviving manuscript or imprint, uncontested provenance | Solid fill |
| 2 | Contemporaneous, but hostile, interested, or provenance-disputed | Two-thirds fill |
| 3 | Retrospective 5–25 years, sworn | Half fill |
| 4 | Retrospective 25–50 years, sworn — affidavit or court testimony | Light fill, dashed edge |
| 5 | Late reminiscence, unsworn, or secondhand | Hollow, dashed edge |
A real, documented contradiction. From 1842 to June 1844 the two lanes run simultaneously and say opposite things, in some cases over the same signatures within weeks. The Hiram Brown notice of 1 February 1844, signed by Joseph and Hyrum, sits months after the high council reading. That is not an interpretive claim; it is visible in dated imprints.
But Lane B is not uniformly late. Two grade-1 contemporaneous manuscripts stand, and with them the revelation is attested in Nauvoo while Joseph was alive. The position that Joseph was not involved has to defeat those two documents — not merely observe that the 1869 affidavits came late.
The thesis that has strengthened with every check is a different one: this is less about what happened in Nauvoo than about when the record of Nauvoo was written — and that holds whichever way the polygamy question breaks.
One axis, 1830–1905. Public record above, private below. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom — more records appear as you go in.
Drag to pan · scroll or pinch to zoom · click any record for its provenance · Esc returns to the whole record
She stays ringed in brass; the records around her stay on the axis, dimmed. [ and ] step too.
The same records as the other three views, on one axis you can move around in. The public record sits above the axis and the private record below it, so the contradiction can be read vertically at any scale.
Zoom governs what is drawn. At the widest view only eight records appear — the ones any account of this history has to deal with. Everything else is still there and surfaces as you descend, the way a map draws more streets the closer you get. Nothing is hidden to make a point; the rank is about legibility, not weight. Where a mark keeps its dot but loses its label, the line under the chart says how many.
The meter reads whatever is on screen. Drag across the 1869–1892 band and watch it darken. That is the finding this page exists for, and here you operate it rather than being told it.
Twenty-nine of the thirty-five women from The alleged sealings are drawn on this axis, in Lane B. The other six have no established sealing date and are not plotted at all — a mark at a guessed position would be the kind of thing this page exists to catch. Their grade is derived from the gap between the claimed sealing and its earliest attestation — not assigned document by document the way the Lane A and Lane B entries are. That is a weaker operation and it is labelled as such in every detail panel.
This page grades sources rather than adopting them, and that obliges it to point at the strongest opposing work rather than characterise it second-hand. The largest body of research arguing that Joseph Smith neither taught nor practised plural marriage is a single connected programme, and it is linked here in full.
One programme, not five sources. Michelle Stone, Jeremy Hoop, Whitney Horning, Rob Fotheringham and Karen Hyatt collaborate: Hoop and Horning are recurring co-hosts on Stone’s series rather than guests, Fotheringham is listed on Stone’s own resources page, and Hyatt produces the series as well as running her own site. Where all of them make the same claim, that is one claim restated, not five witnesses. This page counts it once.
What this side does well, and where it stops. Its dating and custody work is the best material the denial case has produced — affidavit provenance, the Lott Family Bible pen cluster, the Whitney copies, the still-unreleased Clayton journals — it cites locatable documents, and much of it has never been answered in print. Its tampering claims follow a different pattern: the physical observation is usually real, the alleged intent is asserted rather than demonstrated. And on the sexual-relations question specifically its coverage is much thinner than the platform’s size suggests — it does not dispute the Temple Lot transcripts, and it does not engage Joseph Bates Noble at all.
The coverage map is itself a finding. Of the twenty women in the roster above, this programme has tagged coverage of eleven and none whatever of the other nine. Each entry above says which, and links it where it exists.
And the rebuttal literature is thinner still. One substantial published rebuttal names them, and it addresses §132 authorship only. No published rebuttal to Hyatt exists at all, and nothing in print addresses Stone’s affidavit-provenance work. That asymmetry is a fact about the state of the debate, and it is recorded here rather than smoothed over — it cuts against the faithful side, not for it.
This is a working research document, not a finished argument, and the evidence grades on it are expected to move. Every grade is tied to a specific document that can be examined, and when someone actually examines it the grade changes. That has already happened repeatedly, in both directions.
Some numbers here are also not settled in the scholarship itself. Published counts of Joseph Smith's plural wives range from 26 to 52, and this chart follows one roster while marking where another disagrees. If you find an error, that is the design working. The grading exists so that any individual claim can be checked against its source and, if necessary, overturned — and if you find one, please write and say so.
This is an open research project and it improves by being checked. If something here is wrong, or a grade is too generous, or you know of a document that has not been examined, that is worth more than agreement.
Especially useful:
Questions are welcome too, including from people who disagree with the premise entirely.
Status: in progress. Grades will change as documents are checked. Built from Polygamy Timeline and Section 132 Provenance.md (spine v2) and its five companion working files. Grades reflect the verification log and both addenda — seven grades in the v1 spine are superseded. Primary apparatus: the Joseph Smith Papers source notes. Independent research project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Questions and corrections: latterdaytimeline@gmail.com