Payment of taxes or the census records aren’t useful tests in this situation, because what matters for the commencement of a lawsuit is that the method of service of process be reasonably likely to give actual notice of the lawsuit to the person being sued. And a person can pay taxes for property that he has never seen, and census records record one point in time, and people could have moved between that time and the date of service of process.

Another way would be to find where someone was listed as living in the census. Can the courts access current census records?

But like Mark B said, you would have to research the procedures at the time for serving process when the person was out of the country which may have rendered the normal process serving invalid regardless of his normal abode.

Should the court have ruled on both points of law?

The court didn’t say where his “usual place of abode” was. But they did say that the home Augusta lived in was not it. I don’t know the rules of procedure for Utah courts in that period, and, as a practical matter, he may have been impossible to serve until he returned to Utah. Now there are procedures for serving process abroad, but I don’t know what the law was then.

The reality in #1 is not.

Still, shouldn’t Augusta, a person of suitable age and experience, have thought about contacting one of Heber’s business associates and having him get the lawyers involved?

Roughing It

I searched the words “Christian charity” after opening the whole book, and was taken right to this passage.

Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.
With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here — until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No — the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure — and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”