My Dad used to tell the story that when he was on his mission, people would sometimes ask him "which wife are you the son of?". My Dad would smile and respond, "the second one, of course!" What they didn't know was that my Grandpa's first wife died, and he had remarried later (not really polygamous, but both were temple marriages).
I'm curious about what percent of members moved from Ohio to Illinois, in other words who couldn't see past Joseph Smith's financial fraud (or were too dependent on the "tribe" to do anything else), and what percent migrated to Utah, in other words couldn't see through Joseph Smith's "restoration of polygamy" fraud and latched on to Brigham Young? I don't recall seeing numbers (or estimates) any where in the past.
A complementary question could be: Of those who crossed the plains between 1850 and 1890, no matter the degree of difficulty, how many knew about polygamy?
elderolddog Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > A complementary question could be: Of those who > crossed the plains between 1850 and 1890, no > matter the degree of difficulty, how many knew > about polygamy?
For some of the male converts it would be an incentive. It was even discussed widely among the foreign newspapers aimed at the hard of thinking, and ended up in a Sherlock Holmes story.
But I suppose it is comparable to those in our day who end up as fellow travelers to certain ideologies, due to lack of personal discernment.
> It was even discussed widely among the > foreign newspapers aimed at the hard of thinking, > and ended up in a Sherlock Holmes story. > > But I suppose it is comparable to those in our day > who end up as fellow travelers to certain > ideologies, due to lack of personal discernment.
I'm going to point out that once again your two sentences are logically unrelated. This would be an example of your extraneously inserting your political fixations into a secular dialogue.
Perhaps you should go with IllogicalCanuckExmo next time you need a pseudo-pseudonym.
Perhaps it was you then? Well, I wouls say it was you, but you do act as an NPC, so probably don't have an independent existence.
"This would be an example of your extraneously inserting your political fixations into a secular dialogue."
It would be secular, but for the fact we were talking about a religious migration originally and I was comparing it to that. Some people are easily led, whether it is across the Great Plains, Great Steppes, or Great Gobi Desert. It's only after you have been in the baking sun or the freezing winter, only after you have faced hardship, loss and starvation that you become tractable. Or maybe you are already tractable and led by the flaxen cords...
It's time for you to go back to macaRomney's home, dig through those books on advanced mathematics to his copy of the OED. In that volume, if you read down the list you will find the apposite definition of "secular."
But then again, asking for you to walk out the door may overlook your secular pattern of idleness.
Secular is just a Latinate way of saying worldly. It usually refers to aomething non-religious/non-spiritual. I don't need to look up a dictionary for that.
You are the type who never reads past the first definition when consulting a dictionary and hence misses all sorts of nuance. There is truly no greater ignorance than that which refuses to learn.
Lot's Wife Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Throw at will, HWint. Your willful ignorance is > evident in virtually everything you post. > > I fear you like I do a mosquito on a balmy > evening: annoying but easily crushed.
Good that you fear HWint, who didn't write that post. Maybe in time you will grow to fear me instead.
Lot's Wife Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > Good that you fear HWint, who didn't write that > > post. Maybe in time you will grow to fear me > > instead. > > Yes, Jordan. That will happen.
Good at dealing in sarcasm, not so good at spotting it first time round.
I couldn't give a red cent if you fear me. It is of no use to me either way. It would be like having a hamster fear me.
Sarcasm is the use of irony to ridicule someone else. If you say that someday I may learn to fear you, you are using irony to ridicule yourself. You don't even understand that, do you?
Perhaps it's time for LogicalCanuckExmo to come to your defense. Wait--the admins killed that false persona...
Okay, perhaps it's time for HWint to come to your rescue. Make sure to avoid capitalizing the first letters of his sentences so we can pretend he is different from you.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2019 02:31PM by Lot's Wife.
Lot's Wife Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > “I have my own ideas!” Jordan protests above, > anxious that people not intuit his insecurity.
Exorciso te Legione in nomine + patris + et Jesu Christi filii ejus Domini nostri, et in virtute spiritus + sancti. Out damned Spot I say!
Anent response, Jordan, the Sherlock Holmes novel was published in 1887. Therefore it could not have had any impact on those traveling between 1850 and its year of publication.
And my inquiry isn't about what was being bruited about in the press, but rather, how many of those making the quite-a-leap-of-faith-trip across the plains to Utah knew about polygamy, not should have known.
I recall reading that foreign missionaries, at least for a time, denied that the church practiced plural marriage.
I've also just learned that the last wagon train was in 1868, and from then on, the train became the mode of travel. So I would amend my question to restrict it to the 1850 to 1868 period.
And it's just curiosity on my part. I don't mean to prove any points by it. I have this vision of the poor, the destitute being plied with visions of a Paradisical Utah, but not knowing all to which they were exposing themselves.
Fair enough, I accept you changing that and being honest enough to admit it. "Study in Scarlet" is the culmination of a series of penny dreadfuls which Doyle would have read. It is a bit inaccurate but so were the original accounts, some of which were probably written by Gentiles to make money.
Off the top of my head, I've no idea when the first of these accounts started to filter out, but we know many members fell away throughout the early church. Some went off and became gold diggers. Intelligent people traveling through Utah must have noticed something too. A lot of these stories are of the damsel-in-distress variety and other churches produced pamphlets on the subject.
I think polygamy in the form of bigamy was probably very common in the 19th century. They used to say sailors had a woman in every port, but I have heard of men who had wives in the same city! Any European immigrant could turn up in the USA and get married again, because no one could check the records quickly and easily. Polygamy was the dirty secret of the 19th C.
When all's said and done, there are still people converting to Mormonism who know little about it, even though lots of accurate (and inaccurate) information online.
Rumors were rife in England, and as late as 1850 John Taylor tried to quash them there. In 1852, however, Orson Pratt announced the practice from his post in SLC. That is when the change occurred.
That killed the church in England, where polygamy was considered absurd.
ancestors? I'm completely disinterested in finding out my dna, so no problem to me. I knew those who were alive in my lifetime and that is enough. I was never into genealogy. I found it extremely boring. My mother loved it. None of my siblings are interested in the least.
I am a descendant of polygamy and the mormon migration. The only thing I care about is the story of my grandparents. My grandfather was the son of a polygamist. He was deaf. He was from the second wife and she and her children ran the family farm while the husband and 2 other wives went to Southern Utah to live most of the year. AT LEAST my great grandfather left the farm to my grandfather as he was concerned about his ability to earn a living. My grandfather met my grandmother in 3rd grade at the school for the deaf in Colorado Springs. He gave her a valentine. He moved soon after. In his mid 20s, he went back to Colorado looking for my grandmother. He had to promise her father that he was not from polygamy and he lied about his father being a polygamist.
Not like that story belonged here, but I didn't know my grandfather as he died when I was 3. My grandmother was AMAZING. She was also deaf. She was our second mother and we all loved her dearly. She was a huge part of our lives and lived only a few blocks from us. We saw her daily and spent nights at her house. We would argue over who got to spend the night with her.
Would your friends even care? ON the Scottish registry everyone is related to The Bruce or some titled thing. I'd just show them how to do genealogy. Many people other than Mormons do genealogy and most are bored by the time they find their great grandparents. We found actual relatives that are alive now and that was better than finding people you can't talk to.
Anon 3 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Would your friends even care? ON the Scottish > registry everyone is related to The Bruce or some > titled thing. I'd just show them how to do > genealogy.
It's very likely that they were. Scotland was a small and isolated place until the English took it over, and he was so far back that it's highly likely many of them are related to him.
Most people have aristocracy in their ancestry. Not only did nobility take lovers among the peasantry, in only four or five generations, the younger sons of younger sons found themselves heading way down the pecking order.
I don't see the shame in it. I was working in Europe for some months and became friendly with a guy from the USA. He had no idea I had an LDS background, but he told me about his Mormon ancestors back in the 19th century. He wasn't ashamed of them and why should he be? I was a bit surprised because he came from Wisconsin, which I don't associate much with the LDS - other than being near Illinois. He was a terrible womanizer. Too much so. I never worked out if that was because of his Mormon DNA or in spite of it.
If my friends were *real* friends, why would they even care if my ancestors were Mormon or not?
How would my ancestors religion define who I am today?
Recently I joined Daughters of the American Revolution. The assistant Registrar for my chapter worked tirelessly and diligently on my behalf ensuring that I could become a member. I'd about given up due to all the red tape.
I even began wondering if I was being discriminated because my patriot ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War's descendants were converts to Mormonism.
Yet it came down to the fact that it was the Mormon record keeping that was keeping me from joining. The lack of vital statistics back in the day for Utah that made it near impossible to produce birth/death/marriage certificates for some of the ancestors I needed to show connections to my war patriot.
My registrar didn't give up even after I had. She even pointed out in her narratives to Washington DC of the religious persecution some of the early Mormons had to face as they moved from one area to the next to escape their real life enemies.
Isn't that why people immigrated to America? To escape religious persecution?
I'm not ashamed my ancestors were LDS aka Mormons. I take pride in my heritage without taking pride in the cult of Mormonism. My ancestors were strong, stalwart pioneers (most of them.) They had strong faith, determination, and tenacity. They were loyal, hard working, dedicated to a cause, and loved their families.
Those are the values I choose to emulate. Not the ones based on cult worship.
One of my cousins is a retired civil engineer who left Mormonism long ago. He can laugh at it now. He says it was a wonderful religious heritage based on folklore. His mother (my favorite aunt,) was salt-of-the-earth, and raised her children very well.
So he honors the heritage without buying into the crap. And that's how he chooses to leave it. If you knew his mother (she really was a saint,) it would be hard not to.
Thus far to date I've found six war patriots who fought in the Revolutionary War. I've only been able to establish for DAR the connections to one of them. Because of the red tape involved, I'll probably leave it at that. They're each through descendants who took up Mormonism. I'm more inclined to honor their service, and then question why their children converted to Mormonism when it came along. But it was a frontier fringe religion and back then people didn't have much information to make informed judgment calls - they fell under the charismatic spell of Joseph Smith like some might a snake charmer (really!) He must've had charisma because he managed to fool a lot of people. But there were more he didn't fool. Just enough to start a fringe cult religion that took off and has stayed around for a while.
It's the people today who remain Mormons I wonder what makes them tick, than my ancestors. Like someone who smokes. Once you know the dangers of smoking, why would you even start? With education comes power. The same could be said for cult education. Mormons today bury their heads in the sand because they choose to ignore reality at their own peril by remaining in a cult.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2019 04:28PM by Amyjo.