← Back to the main timeline · Exhibit annex
Nearly every claim entered the record decades after the fact, most of it in a sworn-statement campaign the Utah church ran in 1867-1870. Emma, married in 1827, is the one wife with a record from the time. Below: the evidence in summary, then each woman's claim set against its paper trail.
Each row is one woman. The hollow dot is the date her sealing is claimed to have happened. The solid dot is the earliest document anyone wrote asserting it. The bar between them is the wait. Click a row for its paper trail.
The claimed date and the first document are usually the same thing. For most rows the sealing date exists only inside the late statement that asserts it. There is no independent record of the ceremony from the time. Each row names the document its date comes from.
The line at June 1844 is Joseph Smith's death. A claim first recorded to the right of that line entered the record when he could no longer answer it.
The shaded band, 1867-1870, is the sworn-statement campaign: Apostle Joseph F. Smith collected affidavits from surviving claimants a quarter century after the fact, while the Utah church was defending polygamy against the RLDS position that Joseph never taught it. Most rows land there.
"Show more detail" adds a blue diamond for the woman's own first statement, a dashed extension where an early record was only later reframed as a marriage, and markers for 1852 (polygamy announced publicly) and 1892 (the Temple Lot depositions).
Roster and dates follow Todd Compton's standard 33-wife list plus 4 names claimed on other lists, cross-linked to this site's main timeline. Every date and attestation was checked against Brian Hales' josephsmithspolygamy.org, Compton, the Joseph Smith Papers, and the period documents themselves. This page presents the claims and their paper trail; it does not adjudicate them.
One dot per woman. Top row: when her claim was first written down by anyone. Bottom row: when she first said it herself. Click a dot to open that woman's row below.
A document from Joseph's lifetime, written by Joseph, by the woman, or by whoever performed the ceremony, naming her as his wife and dated when the marriage supposedly took place. That is the kind of record Emma has. None of the 37 has one.
The five records that predate his death are the nearest candidates, and they are set out in the summary above: three hostile accusations, one inference from a diary that never calls her a wife, and one revelation and letter whose meaning is itself the dispute. Everything else on this page was first written down after June 1844, most of it decades later.