Thanks for the “anti-Mormon folklore” info.

Julia
Poetrysansonions.blogspot.com

But I don’t think our 19th century ancestors were all that different from us on such a basic level, and my instinct is that regular,long-term sharing of the marital bed was not common. For one thing, a man would have a hard time, I think, convincing his priesthood leaders that he was able financially to support two wives (a condition prerequisite to a legitimate plural marriage) if he were so poor that he couldn’t furnish two rooms with two beds.

As for mixing wives up, that’s another feature of “funny” anti-Mormon stories — Brigham Young is the subject of anecdotes featuring him meeting children on the streets and not recognizing them as his own, or being introduced to his own wives at public dances because he’d forgotten they were already his own. None of those BY stories is true, and I can’t believe it of anybody else, either.

No way to know for certain, I suppose, but I can imagine some incident, either real or imagined, where Grandpa mistook Grandma for her sister, then the story grew and grew in the retelling. (One part that would be easy enough to check to test the validity of the whole story would be to look at the dates of birth of children in both families.)

The one that I thought was a little questionable was the ancestor who married identical twin sisters, and shared a bed with both at the same time. The story included the details that the wives had almost all of their children within two months of each other and that the husband sometimes mixed the wives up. I wish I could remember his first name since I imagine there were many Jensens in Salt Lake City, who came the year after the Willie Handcart Company.

Does the story pass the first blush test, Ardis?

Julia
Poetrysansonions.blogspot.com

I think concealment from federal authorities probably played no real role in any hypothetical “how to practice plural marriage” rulebook. The practice was publicly announced in 1851 (after having been secretly practiced for a number of years), so there was a more than 30-year window before the federal government implemented any effective control during the Raid of the mid to late ’80s (prior to that there were very, very few prosecutions for polygamy). During those years Brigham Young often openly preached and published a lot of incendiary things that would have been better kept from the eyes of strangers, if possible. I just don’t see that an announcement and constant teaching of “Brethren, ask your first wife’s permission” could have added to the burden of persecution, even had there been such a formal rule (which does not seem to have been the case).

But while I don’t think this had any role in promulgating or suppressing instructions concerning plural marriage, these are the kinds of questions and assumptions that we should look at. In the absence of any real historical teaching for most of us, we’ve probably all come up with ideas that may or may not be true to help us understand what was going on.

The Lord is quite an engineer!

He wrote the back of the book.

David B. #6; For simplicity, just assume everyone is a sinner in need of repentance. It’s an excellent first approximation.

What if the Lord hadn’t told Nephi or Noah in exacting detail what to do (I am not trying to comment on historicity in either direction)? There isn’t much leeway for ship building… they had never done it before, and if they didn’t do it exactly right, everyone on board was going to meet a watery end.

On the other hand, marriage is entered into by a lot of different kinds of people and these varied people mean there’s no one set “right way” to do everything. Speaking from a perspective of monogamy even, I see many similar experiences to what you’ve written. Whether or not I spoke to my future father-in-law before proposing marriage, whether we had a big wedding or a small wedding, whether my wife through a bouquet or wore a garter or if we chose to live close to her parents or mine or neither all depended on individual preferences, circumstances, culture, experiences and relationships. It might have been a cultural norm to do X, but because of my preferences or her past experiences, we did Y.

When you state it that way, I would expect we should find lived polygamy as varied and individual as we find lived monogamy. Even today, many of us don’t do every single thing in exact letter to the Church handbook and yet most of us aren’t kicked out of the ward over it