John Tanner's Family Bible

Ron Tanner somehow found and added pictures of John Tanner's family Bible to FamilySearch Family Tree. Since I work with nineteenth century documents almost daily, I can attest that this is an original record, and made by someone with intimate knowledge of the Tanner family. (Either that or it was made by someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Tanner family and nineteenth-century spelling variations, and the counterfeiting skills of Mark Hoffman, and such a dark horse should undoubtedly be counterfeiting something of higher value than this, museum piece as it is.)

There are about half a dozen different handwritings in this record, but most of the first inscriptions are the same handwriting, probably John Tanner's.

[678]

FAMILY RECORD.

BIRTHS.

John Tanner was born August 15th 1778

Taberthy Bently was born August the 23 1780

Lydia Stewart was born November th 18 1783

Elisha Bently Tanner was born March th 23 1801

William Stewart Tanner was born October the 27 1802

Mathilda Tanner was born September the 14 1804

Willard Tanner was born October the 29 1806

Sidney Tanner was born April the 1 1809

John Joshua Tanner was born December the 19 1811

Romela Tanner was born April the 1 1814

BIRTHS.

Nathan Tanner was borne May the 14 1815

Edward and Edwin Tanner was born October th 3 1817

Mariah Loisa Tanner was born November th 28 1818

Martin Henery Tanner was born March the 21 1822

Albert M. Tanner was born April the 4 1825

[Elizabeth's children carried over from the other page]

Sarah Tanner was Born July the 19 — 1840

Francis Tanner was born mach the 10 — 1843

[the last looks like the same hand as the Sidney Tanner letter from San Bernardino]

[679]

FAMILY RECORD.

BIRTHS.

Elise Beswick was born November 28 — 1803

Myron Tanner was Born June th 4 in the year of our Lord 1826

Seth Benjamin Tanner was born March th 6 — 1828

Fremon Everton Tanner was born Jen [January] th 3 1830

Joseph Tanner was born June th 11 — 1833

Philomely Tanner was Born March th 10 1835

David Dan Tanner was born feb th 8 1838

DEATHS.

Taberthy Tanner died Aprial the 9 1801


Willard Tanner died August the 12 1807


Romela Tanner died April the 16 1814

Edwin Tanner died October the 8 1817

Edward Tanner died October the 21 1817



Philomely Tanner Died May th 28 1838.

[680]

FAMILY RECORD.

DEATHS.

Lydia Tanner died may the 31 1825

Francis Tanner died June the 5th 1844

John Tanner died april the 13th 1850

Sariah Tanner Died March the 12 1853

Elisha Bently Tanner Died March 11. 1858.

William Stewart Tanner Died [1875]

DEATHS.

Matilda Tanner Randall died April 17. 1888. in Kirtland Ohio.

Albert Miles Tanner Died. [1879]

Eliza and Caroline Lyman Plead for Child Support

The women who entered plural marriage generally did so out of a firm belief in the Restored Gospel and the prophetic ministry of the Prophet Joseph Smith. There were occasional abuses of the system, some women were coerced into the practice, some men were neglectful or vicious, and some men took wives they could not support, but divorce was possible if desired on the part of the woman, and sometimes the system worked okay for some families.

Amasa Lyman, with his many church responsibilities, may barely have had the means to support one family, let alone eight. John Tanner and Sidney Tanner helped care for Amasa's large family when they were able, but John died in 1850 and Sidney was sent to settle in Beaver in 1857 so Amasa's wives were often left to provide for themselves. Many of the women who entered into the practice of plural marriage suffered severe lifelong consequences, and this included Amasa's plural wives including Eliza Maria Partridge Lyman, who had been a plural wife of Joseph Smith, and Caroline Partridge Lyman. 

After Amasa left the Church, most of his wives took their children and lived well away from him, but it was a difficult situation. Eliza and Caroline wrote this letter not long after he was excommunicated, and hopefully he was able to do something to help them, since the two sisters had ten living children, the youngest just four years old, but he was getting on in years himself.

Fillmore         July 31st 1870

Dear Brother Lyman

You will perhaps be somewhat surprised at receiving a letter from us, but we are driven by stern necessity to do something. We cannot sit down quietly and see our children starve.

We are living now by borrowing of one neighbor then another without any prospect of ever paying which I consider not a very creditable way of doing. It seems to me that there is ^no need of all this destitution, that we are not so much worse off than other folks with regard to property, and can you not devise some plan whereby your family can be fed and clothed and have some little chance for an education? I think you can testify that during the last twenty four or five years we have borne poverty and privations of almost every kind without complaint and have done all in our power to make your life as ^happy as possible under the circumstances and be in truth a help to you, and it is not with a desire to add one sorrow to your heart that we write now, but to let you know how we are situated and see if there cannot be something done to relieve our wants a little. I hope you will excuse me if I have said too much, but I feel almost desperate sometimes, my health is gone and old age comes creeping on, and now when I most need some one to lean on, I find myself standing alone, no Husband to lighten my cares, no Father to provide for my children or to help me in rearing them, no home that I can call my own, no means that I can command to support myself and family, all are gone, gone, and I feel that the weight of responsibility that rests upon me is sometimes ^almost more than I can bear, but I put my trust in the Lord knowing that when all others forsake us he is still our Friend

Hoping to hear from you soon we subscribe ourselves your Friends

Eliza M. Lyman

Caroline E. Lyman

Maria Tanner Lyman, Plural Marriage, and the Godbeites

I am slowly starting to build a case that the Tanner family disliked plural marriage and, with the possible exception of Nathan, only practiced it later and with great reluctance, and then largely as a social safety net for needy women. Here is one more data point.

In 1872 more than 400 Utah women sent a petition to Congress requesting that the Territory not be admitted as a state as long as the Church was still practicing plural marriage. The petition was created and circulated by the spiritualist Godbeites, who were seeking to wrest political and economic power from Brigham Young. 

In the case of a similar petition the Church claimed that its signers did not know the exact contents of the petition, but it is probably impossible to tell if it was the case with the women listed in this petition. There were a number of acute stresses in the Territory in the early 1870s, and many families would have been struggling.

Here are three excerpts from the petition; the first from the cover letter, the second from the actual petition; the third from the list of names.

The language is very strong, but Louisa Maria Tanner Lyman had suffered greatly as the first of many wives of the polygamist and probably mentally ill Amasa M. Lyman. By this point he had been ousted from the Quorum of the Twelve and excommunicated. Is it possible that he put her name on the petition without her consent? It's probably impossible to say.

(In case anyone questions the identification, although she went by the name "Maria," she usually went by the name Louisa M Lyman in government documents, and there were no other women of the same name in the Territory.)

Additional Reading

Edward Leo Lyman, Amasa Mason Lyman: Mormon Apostle and Apostate, A Study in Dedication, 2009.

Ronald Walker, Wayward Saints: The Godbeites and Brigham Young, 1998.