A sourced public reference

Fifty-five women

Brigham Young was sealed or married to fifty-five women. Most people can name one. This site names all of them, gives each one a page, and says plainly where the record runs out.

See all 55 wives What the numbers show

Brigham Young, photographed about 1865 — **Brigham Young** 1801–1877 Charles William Carter, c. 1865 — National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons · CC0

Miriam Angeline Works — **Brigham Young** 1801–1877 Charles William Carter, c. 1865 — National Portrait Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons · CC0

The shape of it

Nine numbers

55women on the standard published list
19sealed in the Nauvoo temple in six weeks, Jan–Feb 1846
14were married to another living man at the time
8were widows of Joseph Smith
16bore him children — 57 in all
25are documented as living in his household
11marriages ended in divorce or documented separation
1is the number clearly documented as leaving the church
15left any words of their own

Every one of these counts is generated from the research table, not typed. The analysis page says what each number does and does not establish, and where scholars disagree about it.

Where to begin

Start here

All fifty-five wives

The full list, filterable by era, by whether she lived with him, by whether she had children, by whether she was already married.

Chronology

His life set beside his marriages, from the 1824 wedding in New York to the last sealing in 1872.

Marriage, sealing and adoption

What the words meant, how they changed, and why "sealed for eternity" and "married" are not the same claim.

What the numbers show

The marriages counted by phase, by sealing type, by polyandry, by household — and the honest blanks.

In his own words

Brigham Young on marriage, women, children and the theology behind them, with the citation for each.

Their own words

Every diary, letter, affidavit and biography known to survive for each of the fifty-five — and, for forty of them, the fact that none does.

Take the data

The whole table as a formatted Excel workbook, a CSV or JSON — the same rows behind every page here. Free to use and to correct.

The trivia game

How much do you actually know about Brigham Young? Every question carries its source.

The number that matters most

Forty of them never got to speak

15 of the fifty-five left words of their own — a diary, letters, an autobiography, a sworn affidavit. The other 40 are known only through other people's papers.

Exactly one published a full-length account of her own life: Ann Eliza Webb, who wrote Wife No. 19 in 1875 to destroy him. The most-read first-person account of being married to Brigham Young is by the woman who left and made a career of attacking it. That is not a reason to discount her. It is a reason to notice that the other fifty-four had no comparable platform.

“I will go into heaven alone, rather than have scratching and fighting around me. I will set all at liberty. ‘What, first wife, too?’ Yes, I will liberate you all.”

Brigham Young, 21 September 1856 — the sermon in full

See what survives, woman by woman The silence, in full

An open invitation

The book that does not exist

Todd Compton's In Sacred Loneliness (1997) gave each of Joseph Smith's plural wives a biography. Nobody has done it for Brigham Young's. John G. Turner's Pioneer Prophet — the best modern biography — prints no list of the wives at all; its only published roster is a single endnote naming the fifteen women who were legally married to other men. Jeffery Ogden Johnson's 1987 table in Dialogue remains the only comprehensive published list, and it is a table, not a set of lives.

These women are the largest un-narrated group in nineteenth-century Mormon history. We want two things built: a Compton-equivalent book, and a podcast in the shape of Year of Polygamy that tells their stories one at a time.

Write to us Read the full invitation