{"id":42287,"date":"2021-12-07T04:46:32","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T09:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=42287"},"modified":"2025-05-26T06:52:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T12:52:21","slug":"filling-the-measure-of-their-creation-in-pioneer-utah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2021\/12\/filling-the-measure-of-their-creation-in-pioneer-utah\/","title":{"rendered":"Filling the Measure of Their Creation In Pioneer Utah\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

I like people; that\u2019s why I got a PhD in demography. My ideal existence is some rural village where my bevy of kids play outside in the streets with all the other neighborhood kids while the adults chat on front porches, where life is essentially an expanding cycle of weddings, births, and reunions (which according to my reading, is essentially what the celestial kingdom is). While most people aspire to some complex mix of competing goods in an attempt to \u201chave it all,\u201d the simple archetype for my ideal life is an old Jewish woman<\/a> in New York City with 2,000 descendants for whom faith and family were everything,<\/span>\u00a0while the my antitype for society is the childless, future-less dystopia portrayed in the PD James book\/movie <\/span>Children of Men<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This attitude is to some extent embedded in our theology and culture, and I think that\u2019s one reason why our birth rates are so high. Not as high as the Hutterites, Amish, or Ultra-Orthodox Jews, but still high nonetheless. From the folklore and early histories I absorbed being raised in Utah Valley (and from my and my children\u2019s love of <\/span>The Great Brain<\/span><\/i> Series) I\u2019ve always envisioned Pioneer-era Utah as a golden age for this kind of family-centered, youthful communitarian existence. (And yes, like all golden ages I\u2019m sure it was complicated). Maybe because I\u2019m raising my bevy of children in a relatively childless environment outside of DC and I\u2019m pining for the small village, I\u2019ve been wondering just how many kids and big families there actually were in early pioneer Utah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the good folks at IPUMS<\/a>, a project that provides user-friendly census data, this is actually pretty easy to get numbers on. I ran a cross-tab showing percent of the population in Utah that was 14 and under, percent that is 15-64, and percent that is 65+. The former category divided by the middle category creates the \u201cyouth dependency ratio,\u201d or the number of youth per working age adult. This is a pretty standard measure that allows us to compare Utah with other countries and areas. I ran the numbers and calculated the ratios for each of the decennial censuses from 1850 on, both for the US and Utah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A few caveats: often censuses have back stories that may affect results (for example, I assume the 1890 Census is missing because a fire destroyed most of those records), so I\u2019m not sure how accurate the 1850 Utah census was given that it was taken shortly after the entry into Utah, but I think overall this paints an accurate picture. Also, later in the 19th century there were more non-Latter-day Saint settlers, so these numbers are \u201cconservative\u201d in the sense that the Latter-day Saint population was even younger once you filter out the heavily adult male miners in Park City.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even so, my image of settlements bursting with children appears to be pretty accurate. (As a side note, sometimes faithful members seem to take the view that polygamy is a great mystery whose divine reasons we should just \u201cput on a shelf\u201d when in my view the both D&C and the Book of Mormon are pretty clear about its purpose: to raise up seed, and raise up seed it certainly did as marriage rates for women were about as high as could be; for example, in her analysis of Manti Utah, Kathryn Daynes could only find one woman in the early Utah years who never married). In 1860 there were <\/span>more<\/span><\/i> children than working-age adults in Utah. This is incredibly high. As a point of comparison, the only country in the world right now that can say the same<\/a> is Mali<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If there was a golden age of Latter-day Saint frontier life it was probably 1860s Utah (the fact that the Civil War was keeping the \u201cgentiles\u201d occupied probably had something to do with this). It was after the starvation era (unless you were in St. George) and the Utah War, but before the anti-polygamy persecutions. As seen, as time progressed we tracked general trends and had fewer children (and the coming of the railroad probably dampened Utah\u2019s distinctiveness of non-Latter-day Saints moved in). During my childhood in 1990s Orem we still had about 1\/2 a child per working age adult\u2014still enough to provide ample fodder for neighborhood night games and bus stop culture. Now, we have about 1\/3 of a child per working age adult, in comparison to the US\u2019 1\/4 of a child per working age adult. At this point I\u2019ve kind of given up on trying to replicate my youth for my kids, and have consigned myself to the fact that planned play dates and driving to another neighborhood to trick or treat is the reality of 21st century parenting, but in my own house of six kids and not enough adults we try to carve out a little piece that existence.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like people; that\u2019s why I got a PhD in demography. My ideal existence is some rural village where my bevy of kids play outside in the streets with all the other neighborhood kids while the adults chat on front porches, where life is essentially an expanding cycle of weddings, births, and reunions (which according to my reading, is essentially what the celestial kingdom is). While most people aspire to some complex mix of competing goods in an attempt to \u201chave it all,\u201d the simple archetype for my ideal life is an old Jewish woman in New York City with 2,000 descendants for whom faith and family were everything,\u00a0while the my antitype for society is the childless, future-less dystopia portrayed in the PD James book\/movie Children of Men.\u00a0\u00a0 This attitude is to some extent embedded in our theology and culture, and I think that\u2019s one reason why our birth rates are so high. Not as high as the Hutterites, Amish, or Ultra-Orthodox Jews, but still high nonetheless. From the folklore and early histories I absorbed being raised in Utah Valley (and from my and my children\u2019s love of The Great Brain Series) I\u2019ve always envisioned Pioneer-era Utah as a golden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":42291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/Picture1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42287"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50081,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42287\/revisions\/50081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}