Free Republic

Gathering Joe Jessop’s brood together for a group photo is a challenge for even the most patient of snappers. After all, there are five wives, 46 children and – at the last count – 239 grandkids to squeeze into the frame. That’s because the 88-year-old is the bed-hopping patriarch of one of the world’s most extraordinary families. Joe and his clan live in Short Creek, Utah, a 6,000-strong community of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamous offshoot of the Mormon Church. Joe says: “My family came to Short Creek for the same reason...

SNIP THE PRINCIPLE of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples. In this "new and everlasting covenant" with God, plural wives were to be taken so that the faithful might "multiply and replenish the earth." After Smith was assassinated by an anti-Mormon mob in Illinois, Brigham Young led believers on an epic 1,300-mile journey west...