Statistical Data on Pedogamy
To learn how extensive the system of child brides was in Utah, many years ago I began collecting data on all marriages performed in Utah in 1857. Sources for marriages were the "Western States Marriages" database compiled by BYU-Idaho, Endowment House records, other sealing records, the 1857 run of the Deseret News, journals, correspondence, Ancestry.com's marriage database, and Google searches (for married, Utah, 1857). Once I had the full names of the couples, I then researched their birthdates and the dates of birth of their firstborn children using both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org/FamilyTree. After entering this data into a database, I then calculated their ages at marriage, the date of conception of their first child (subtracting 288 days from the child’s birthdate), and the wife’s age at the time of the conception of her first child. The latter was to see how early in the marriage we could document for certain that sexual intercourse had taken place. I then filtered the data, seeking only those girls who were 16.9 or younger and who married adult men at least a decade older than they were— i.e. they were not marrying age “peers.”
After several years of data collection, I had found 423 marriages that took place in Utah during the year 1857. Some of these couples were first civilly married and then later sealed together in the Mormon ritual. If I found both dates, I entered the earlier date into the database. I accept full responsibility for any errors in my data sets. The statistics of these marriages include:
The average age of the 423 grooms was 39.5 while the average age of the brides was 22.4, a difference of 17.1 years
In 12 of the 423 marriages, the bride was clearly pregnant before they married because the date of conception of their first child was three months or more prior to the marriage date; none of these premarital conceptions were found in the cases of pedogamy. For another 9 couples, the conception date was prior to the marriage date, but it was within three months of the marriage date so the child could have simply been born prematurely, throwing off the theoretical conception date
64 (or 15.1%) of the 423 marriages were pedogamous, with the child brides being 16.9 or younger and their husbands being 27 or older
Of the 64 pedogamous marriages that took place in 1857, the average age of the child brides was 15.2 and the average groom was 41.3, a 26-year difference
40 of these marriages resulted in the conception of a child within one year of marriage, so we know sex was happening in the early stages of these marriages
27 (or 6.4%) of the total 423 marriages of 1857 were of girls 14.9 or younger with husbands 25.0 or older
Of this younger set of 27 marriages, the average age of the girls was 14.1 while the average husband was 40.0, again almost 26 years in age difference
Of the youngest girls who married pedogamously in 1857, five were 13, two were 12, and one was just 11 years of age: Sarah Jane Barney was 11 when she married 34-year-old George W. Wilkins
George W. Wilkins, a counselor in the Spanish Fork ward bishopric, also married 16-year-old Caroline E. Butler on the same day, in Brigham Young's office in the Beehive House. However, the marriage of 11-year-old Barney to Wilkins did not last long and they had no children. In her autobiography, Barney only stated, "At 15 I became the 2nd wife to a 24 year old man." But this was actually her second marriage to Joseph Smith Black at the end of 1860. She wrote nothing about her first, pedogamous marriage to Wilkins.
LDS apologists, in defending Joseph Smith's marriages to children, claim that child brides were not uncommon in those days and we should not place our presentist mores onto historical communities. To verify or disprove their claim, I wanted to compare this data to two other similar American populations. (Also, judging by contemporary non-Mormon reaction to pedogamy, it is clear that this was aberrant behavior back then.) Getting this comparative data proved very challenging as few American communities kept civil marriage records in 1857 that also included the ages of brides and grooms at the time of marriage. I eventually found such marriage record collections for Springfield, Hamden County, Massachusetts and for Branch County, Michigan. Both were rural populations of mainly European descent far from major urban populations, similar to Utah.
The data from the Branch County, Michigan cohort was very different in comparison to the data from Utah. 383 marriages were performed there during 1857, about 40 fewer than in Utah, but that is about the only similarity.
Of the 383 marriages, only 6 were of brides 16 or younger: one was 14, one was 15, and four were 16
The average age of the 383 brides was 22.6 while the average age of the grooms was 28.0, a difference of 5.4 years (compared to a 17.1 age difference in Utah)
Only one pedogamous marriage occurred that year when 15-year-old Minerva Mudgett married 26-year-old Samuel M. Paule on July 1, 1857 (compared to 60 pedogamous marriages in Utah)
The data I collected from Springfield, Massachusetts was similar to that of Michigan, and again, very different from that of Utah. There were 232 marriages there in 1857, about half that of all of Utah, but still a large and significant statistical cohort.
Of the 232 marriages, only one bride was under 16.9, 15-year-old Marie Schlotterbeck, who married 23-year-old fresco painter, Charles J. Schumacher
The average age of the brides was 24.1 and the average age of the grooms was 27.5, a difference of only 3.4 years
No marriages were pedogamous
One thing that surprised me, as a professional genealogist, was just how much older (non-Mormon) women were, on the average, when they married. Previously, when estimating a woman's birth year using the date of a first marriage, I generally subtracted 21 years. But the data here suggests that the average young woman was really 23 or 24 when she married— or at least they were in the 1850s.
The huge difference here, as demonstrated in the chart, is the fact that so many 1857 marriages in Utah involved child brides marrying significantly older men, while the combined communities in Michigan and Massachusetts had only one such marriage.
While some might want to whitewash, or even deny, these stories and statistical findings, with our current national discussions on sexual consent (and lack thereof), it seems timely for those of us with a Utah Mormon heritage and ancestry to confront this unsavory part of our history and recognize clearly the dangers of theocratic rule, whether blatant or subtle. Excesses in abuse of ecclesiastical power occurred, with young girls bearing the worst of it, being groomed into marital and sexual practices that vexed and infuriated the rest of America at the time. Clearly, all the bad press that marrying child brides received demonstrated this, although referred to as the less offensive umbrella term,"polygamy," in all cases. We can no longer shake our heads in disbelief at current pedogamous religions. They are doing what our own ancestors did not long ago, still believing this to be a manifestation of divine will.
This is the final of five pieces in a series of articles that discuss child brides in historic times in Utah. Read the other pieces here, here, here, here, and here, and here.