“I’m not Catholic, I’m Jewish, but I’ll tell you, If I ever thought about being Catholic, Tim would be the best advertisement for that faith that there is. I happened to attend, almost sneak in I would say, but attend…the Al Smith Dinner in New York which is the big dinner of all the Irish-Catholic pols in New York…and Tim was in his element and he took a double take when he saw me there because I was just trying to cover a political story. I was not properly dressed of course and nobody could be more embracing and welcoming than Tim. He said, ‘you know we might try to bring you over Fineman, we might try to real you in.’ And you know what, he would have been a great fisherman for his faith to use the analogy on purpose. Obviously his faith animated him… in whatever way he expressed it he was a very deeply devout Catholic….I think the faith that he must have learned up in Buffalo from his parents that he grew up in, in that Catholic community in Buffalo meant everything to him and helped guide and focus him and keep him grounded in this city where way too many people pursue false gods. And Tim was the kind of guy who never pursued false Gods. He pursued the real one.”

see here

See also the related essay by Jon Meacham.

I’ve seen that in my family history. A Swedish child named Hëlje had his temple work done as a female although it said “Pilte B.” (male child) right there in the record. I assume that the lady who did the work read the name as some variant of “Helga.”

And by the way, congratulations to FAIR and T&S for this effort at rapprochement.

I will try to look up mormon immigration records and see if there is any male-female discrepancy, but I think the default assumption should be close to a 50-50 split. Last night I went through a 10000 name list on the internet of potential Mormon Scandinavian immigrants and tried to guess male names from female ones and came up with a 54-46 female-male ratio, but that could reflect a propensty of mine to have a guessing bias towards female classification.

Thanks for your comments. I have been thinking about expanding my research and possibly publishing it somewhere, and if so the concerns you raise would be worth addressing.

You are right that 1880 snap shot statistics can give only part of the picture, especially when polygamy was much more prevalent in 1857 during the Mormon Reformation. Did you look at the Daynes article I referenced in the comments? I think her charts provide startling confirmation for my theory of pyramidal age demographics enabling polygamy by increasing marital age differences. Here is a quote from page 106

In any case, promoting plural marriages clearly did ” not prevent most young men from marrying.” When there were more single men than women because of ” plural marriage in nineteenth-century Manti, how did such a high ” proportion marry and marry at relatively young ages? Single men ” found wives by seeking them among women whose ages differed ” considerably from their own. This was particularly true for the ” earlier Utah cohort when polygamy created the greatest marriage ” squeeze against men, as Figure 5 reveals.

You suggest my analysis didn’t account for “lost boys in Utah who left the state” and that would be correct. I recently looked this up and Utah’s male-female ratio was precisely the same as the US as a whole (51-49) which, at least preliminarily, suggests there was no male exodus away from Utah, at least none that would make a statistical difference.

I agree that further study is needed to study what happened to some of the over 35 year olds that hadn’t married yet. But if you put this against a western backdrop in 1880 and couple that with the idea that 21% of Utahns weren’t Mormon:

Never-married Males
Age 2006-US 1880-US 1880-UT 1880- NV
15-19 98.5 98.8 98.6 98.7
20-24 86.7 77.3 70.3 91.7
25-29 57.4 41.1 33.5 77.3
30-34 33.4 23.8 22.7 62.0
35-39 23.3 14.9 17.4 51.1

A theoretical “lost boy” at even at age 35 would have to move quite a bit a ways from Utah to see better odds of getting married.

Age disparity has much more explaining power than does male-female convert ratios, but I agree I can do a more thorough job establishing that.

Researcher: I don’t know if the FLDS drove out their so-called “lost boys” in order to create a bigger pool of available marriagble women, or whether certain boys or young adults left on their own _after_ they observed that there were no available single women left in their age range. There have been so many false charges concerning the FLDS, I don’t know what to believe.

The same cause/effect question would be applicable to 19th century LDS polygamy. I doubt there was any conspiracy to kick out young men for the purpose of creating a bigger pool of women available to become multiple wives. I don’t think anyone has seriously made that charge against 19th century LDS polygamists. If there were any LDS lost-boys, my first guess would be that they left _after_ seeing they no longer had any prospects. Though there may have been isolated exceptions.

My understanding is that polygamy was more of a calling that came from church leadership, not something a man could choose on his own. But, that once the calling was given, the man and his current wife/wives were to decide who to bring on as a sister-wife, and with the new wife’s consent, of course. Is my understandin correct in that?

Although it was not a major cause of me going inactive, before I left the church I didn’t find any marriage prospects in the church. “All the good ones were taken” kind of thing. (Or at least I thought so.) Had I stayed around for just a few more years, I would have seen some of those “good ones” get divorced and re-enter the “available pool” in my age range. (And looking back, I wasn’t such a great catch myself.)

As Bookslinger noted, much more exhaustive research would be needed to really nail a thesis down on the subject.

But given the experience of the FLDS, it is a very interesting question to ask. Too bad they can’t look at the 1890 census for additional information. Perhaps looking at other states for men in the correct age range who were born in the Mormon region? How difficult would that be? Thesis or dissertation?