"Dating Fanny Alger"

[birdgirl]

Senator, on 27 July 2010 - 09:45 AM, said:

How do you know she was willing!? Was there no such thing a rape in 1800s? (and I'm speaking to the cause of her pregnancy)

I don't know if she was raped- I've never heard that before. If she was and Emma wasn't mistaken about what she saw in the barn that would be really sick. Was there such a thing as statutory rape like we have today? I think Joseph with Lucy Walker would qualify. I know- presentism, but it still creeps me out.

[Bunk]

I don't know how it works, I'm just repeating what he said, and I trust he knows what he's talking about. See here and here.

I also trust he knows what he's talking about... when I look at your links I seem him saying there are ways to do it with mtDNA or autosomal DNA, in agreement with what I said.

[T-Shirt]

Am I the only moron who thought the title of this thread referred to what it must have been like to go on a date with Fanny Alger?

T-Shirt

[Chronos]

Doug, if you feel there is a discrepancy you can post about it. Speaking in such a disrespectful manner of a prophet will not be tolerated. Only warning.

As for the rest of the thread, any more talk of personal sexual matters will have the thread closed.

~Chronos

[Emerson]

I also trust he knows what he's talking about... when I look at your links I seem him saying there are ways to do it with mtDNA or autosomal DNA, in agreement with what I said.

Well then the fault of misrepresenting must be with me . I just remember him saying they haven't been able to conclude on her genealogy yet, whatever the reasons may be. My apologies for not being able to express (or obviously understand) what those reasons are.

[DonBradley]

Am I the only moron who thought the title of this thread referred to what it must have been like to go on a date with Fanny Alger?

T-Shirt

I'm glad you caught the double entendre, T-Shirt.

Don

[DonBradley]

Yes. He wasn't Joseph's:

Interesting that, according to Chauncy Webb, Emma 'drove the girl, who was unable to conceal the consequences of her celestial relation with the prophet, out of her house,' yet Fanny was carrying a child who has been proven not to have been fathered by the Prophet.

Hi HT,

The situation is more complex than that. Or perhaps simpler. There actually nothing in the historical record to indicate that Orrison Smith was Fanny Alger's child. He wasn't raised by her, and there are no records presented by Ugo or anyyone else linking them. Rather, a descendant of Orrison Smith for some reason believed he was a descendant of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger. That Ugo tested this person shows only that he has very relaxed standards for who he'll test, not that there was any significant reason to believe Orrison Smith was either Joseph Smith's or Fanny Alger's child.

Don

[DonBradley]

DNA results confirmed that Orrison Smith,who was the first child of Fanny, was in fact NOTa descendent of Joseph Smith.

If anyone is aware of evidence that Orrison Smith was Fanny Alger's child, please let me know.

Don

[Storm Rider]

I don't know how it works, I'm just repeating what he said, and I trust he knows what he's talking about. See here and here.

If he knows what he is talking about, how do so many others claim that there are absolutely no descendants of Israel among the Native peoples of the Americas? Someone is not accurate in their statements.

[Bunk]

Well then the fault of misrepresenting must be with me . I just remember him saying they haven't been able to conclude on her genealogy yet, whatever the reasons may be. My apologies for not being able to express (or obviously understand) what those reasons are.

No problem!

Actually, as I was thinking about it over lunch, I realized the tests could only be autosomal DNA (not mtDNA or a maternal test, since the mother's identity is not the question). So even I misspoke.

A test on autosomal DNA would require several markers for comparison, and would only give a statistical answer based on the number of markers compared. If Joseph was the father, you would expect 50% of the daughter's autosomal markers (or genes) to be the same as Joseph's. So if one or two came up negative, you would have to keep testing until there were so many negatives that paternity was just too unlikely. If one or two came up positive, you would need to keep seeing that until it approached 50% with such significance that paternity is the only likely explanation.

Today you could send your two DNA samples to a company or any decent university facility, with access to modern automated sequencers, and they could give you thousands of marker comparisons in a day or two.

Why is Ugo taking so long? This seems very strange to me... unless he doesn't have good samples.

[cinepro]

It is interesting that the more facts we have, the worse Joseph's detractors look, and those who rely upon them.

Glenn

In what way is it detracting to the Prophet Joseph Smith to theorize that he might have had children with his polygamous wives?

[DonBradley]

hey DonBradley,

Does your paper reconcile these two items?

1. polygamy as loop-holed in the Book of Mormon was supposed to be for raising up righteous seed unto the Lord:

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/jacob/2#30

30 For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up ^aseed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.

2. Joseph Smith had upwards of 33 wives, but no seed nor shrubs nor vines or stubs came from his own polygamy (*pointing at statements above which show that Joseph only had 9 children with Emma*) . Why was Joseph following a different rule for polygamy with the other 30-something-something women than the other saints like Heber & Brigham just doing what their prophet said God wanted them to do? Was he just tilling ground? And when you look at the openness and helpful nature of the sister-wives in other polygamous families (even today with the FLDS) compared to Joseph's alley cat method you can't justifiably say that Joseph's wives were in any way *helpful* to Emma. Too many discrepancies.

Hi Doug,

I think you need to raise your ideal of what scholarship is and should be. Historical scholarship is not polemics, in which the historian ought to take up alleged "discrepancies" and "reconcile" them. It is, rather, an attempt to systematically discover what happened in the past.

Naturally, historical scholarship can have faith implications, as scholarship does for the question you raise. There is at minimum one child who came from Joseph Smith's polygamy: Josephine Lyon Fisher. (This stills awaits DNA confirmation, but the published historical evidence for it is good, and I know of a great deal that is unpublished.) And I believe, with reason, that there were a couple others. Perhaps in time this will all get sorted out satisfactorily.

In either case, Latter-day Saints aren't stuck with the simple dichotomy you propose: that Joseph Smith had to be having offspring by all these wives to raise up seed per Jacob 2, or his polygamy was illegitimate. His role could have been to help establish polygamy in the Church, whether or not he raised up many offspring. His time may have been cut short, as BY suggested, or he would surely have raised up many offspring by polygamy. Or maybe he took more wives than he ought, from which it wouldn't follow that polygamy itself was evil or he wasn't a prophet.

And let's be honest. If Joseph Smith did have children by many women, this wouldn't satisfy critics--they wouldn't then say, "Ah, well, then he was living polygamy under the terms of Jacob 2:30." Rather, they would say, "Look--we can prove he had sex with all those women!"

To recap, scholarship isn't about polemics, as your post assumes--setting a low ideal for scholarship on your part, but about finding out what happened. It has faith implications, but for those implications to be well worked out it takes more than a simplistic dichotomy or "damned if he did; damned if he didn't" approach from critics. I know you can reason better than that. So, do!

Don

[DonBradley]

Why is Ugo taking so long? This seems very strange to me... unless he doesn't have good samples.

So, Bunk, if a man had a daughter in 1844, it's a simple thing to determine with confidence several generations later that she was his daughter, with no complexities being introduced by the fact that fewer and fewer of his chromosomes will appear among the descendants and more and more of the chromosomes of others will appear?

In the Y chromosome tests Ugo doesn't only test the descendants' Y chromosomes against Joseph Smith's Y chromosome, but also against the Y chromosome of the other putative father, since, being a careful researcher, he doesn't want to assume that the Y chromosome of the other putative father differs greatly from Joseph Smith's (even though this is very probable). How much more complicated is it when each chromosome that appears to come from JS could also come from sixteen or so other ancestors in his same generation?

If you could you, perhaps, find examples of where this has been done--where an individual living several generations ago has been identified as an ancestor to modern persons without using either the simple Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA tests--and with confidence and speed at that, I'm sure Ugo would love to hear from you. Really.

Don

[Bunk]

So, Bunk, if a man had a daughter in 1844, it's a simple thing to determine with confidence several generations later that she was his daughter, with no complexities being introduced by the fact that fewer and fewer of his chromosomes will appear among the descendants and more and more of the chromosomes of others will appear?

In the Y chromosome tests Ugo doesn't only test the descendants' Y chromosomes against Joseph Smith's Y chromosome, but also against the Y chromosome of the other putative father, since, being a careful researcher, he doesn't want to assume that the Y chromosome of the other putative father differs greatly from Joseph Smith's (even though this is very probable). How much more complicated is it when each chromosome that appears to come from JS could also come from sixteen or so other ancestors in his same generation?

If you could you, perhaps, find examples of where this has been done--where an individual living several generations ago has been identified as an ancestor to modern persons without using either the simple Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA tests--and with confidence and speed at that, I'm sure Ugo would love to hear from you. Really.

Don

Actually I was thinking along those lines when I suggested he lacks "good samples". You are right. He must be working with material from living descendants, several generations removed, which are probably the only samples he could ever have (unless he goes into the grave robbing business... seriously, it has been done. I know Scott Woodward and some students went to Egypt to dig for mummies while he (SW) was at BYU). Without grave samples it would be far from a simple thing, but it can still be done.

[Glenn101]

In what way is it detracting to the Prophet Joseph Smith to theorize that he might have had children with his polygamous wives?

I should have been a little clearer in my remarks. There have been charges leveled at Joseph that he impregnated women while they were married to other men. Zina Jacobs is one that comes to mind. The article on the dna tests noted that Zebulon Jacobs is not a descendant of Joseph Smith.

Glenn

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Why wouldn't she have sex within a spiritual (if not legal) marriage?

Why would she? Just asking the question does not mean that you have established it to be plausible. Of course we are just speculating right?

[Hamba Tuhan]

There actually nothing in the historical record to indicate that Orrison Smith was Fanny Alger's child. He wasn't raised by her, and there are no records presented by Ugo or anyyone else linking them.

Fair enough. Is there any indication anywhere--outside of hearsay--that Fanny actually was pregnant at all during this time?

[ttribe]

If anyone is aware of evidence that Orrison Smith was Fanny Alger's child, please let me know.

Don

Hmmm, well, do we have any idea who Ms. Alger's children were?

[DonBradley]

Fair enough. Is there any indication anywhere--outside of hearsay--that Fanny actually was pregnant at all during this time?

We know from other evidence that the person who said Fanny was visibily pregnant at the time--Chauncey Webb--is the one in whose home she stayed when kicked out of the Smith's. The exact sources on this will be in the JWHA chapter which will be published in a matter of weeks.

BTW, just so you know, historical scholarship doesn't have a concept of "hearsay." "Hearsay" is a legal/polemical concept, and one that people only import into history for polemical purposes. Historians speak, instead, of firsthand testimony, secondhand testimony, thirdhand testimony, etc.

But the testimony provided by Chauncey Webb, that Fanny was visibly pregnant, would be admissible in court and not be definable as "hearsay" under the law since it is, in fact, his own firsthand testimony of what he experienced during Fanny's stay in his house.

Cheers,

Don

[DonBradley]

...

[Edited to change stuff.]

[Hamba Tuhan]

We know from other evidence that the person who said Fanny was visibily pregnant at the time--Chauncey Webb--is the one in whose home she stayed when kicked out of the Smith's. The exact sources on this will be in the JWHA chapter which will be published in a matter of weeks.

Interesting. I was under the impression that Fanny was taken in by the mother of Chauncey's wife, Ann Eliza.

BTW, just so you know, historical scholarship doesn't have a concept of "hearsay." "Hearsay" is a legal/polemical concept, and one that people only import into history for polemical purposes. Historians speak, instead, of firsthand testimony, secondhand testimony, thirdhand testimony, etc.

BTW, just so you know, I'm a historian. Surely, however, I could have been clearer: Is there any evidence which would indicate that Fanny actually bore a child around this time? Not to be glib, but I've personally assumed someone was pregnant when she was not. More than once. I'm OK with someone testifying that a woman looks pregnant; testifying that a woman actually was pregnant usually requires a birth or a miscarriage to corroborate it. Otherwise, it's not really firsthand.

[Dr. Jd]

Don,

I hope you let us know when your paper is published. I have an interesting link to Joseph's plural marriages. One of my ancestors had a fake marriage with one of Joseph Smith's wives.

Earlier someone questioned Joseph Smith practicing polygamy if not for procreation. I may be wrong, but I believe that God teaches line upon line. Thus, I don't believe Joseph fully understood the entire concept of sealings and Polygamy at first. I could be wrong, but I don't thing every detail was explained to him all at once.

[DonBradley]

Interesting. I was under the impression that Fanny was taken in by the mother of Chauncey's wife, Ann Eliza.

You mean Eliza Jane. Ann Eliza was the yet-unborn daughter. But I'm afraid I fail to see the distinction between Fanny staying in the home of Eliza Jane or the home of Chauncey Webb, since, as man and wife, they lived together.

BTW, just so you know, I'm a historian. Surely, however, I could have been clearer:

Cool! I assumed otherwise relatively few of us are historians, and since hearsay is not a historian's category of evidence. But I appreciate the clarification.

Is there any evidence which would indicate that Fanny actually bore a child around this time? Not to be glib, but I've personally assumed someone was pregnant when she was not. More than once. I'm OK with someone testifying that a woman looks pregnant; testifying that a woman actually was pregnant usually requires a birth or a miscarriage to corroborate it. Otherwise, it's not really firsthand.

I have evidence besides Chauncey Webb, which will be in the papers. But I think even Chauncey Webb alone provides substantial evidence. Webb said that Fanny was forced to leave the Smith home because she was visibly pregnant. Some accounts say Emma caught her with Joseph. I suspect both were so. In any case at that point she came to his home, and we know that some explanation for why she needed to do so was provided. She stayed there multiple weeks, and my evidence would place it at more than five. So if Fanny looked pregnant when she arrived, Webb had a chance to observe whether her bloating dissipated or her belly grew. He was also in a position to hear explanations from her and those who placed her with the Webbs, explanations we know were given.

(BTW, Fanny was by all accounts a very attractive young woman, and she was a teenager. I'm not sure how many attractive non-pregnant teens look pregnant to you, but the number for me is pretty low.)

Clearly we have evidence, and not "hearsay"--whatever that is supposed to mean in a discipline that lacks the concept. Whether one deems this evidence sufficient, it is real evidence and not just to be brushed off.

But I don't have to rely on Chauncey alone. I also have letters of Eliza Jane's about Fanny Alger and her stay in the home.

Don

[DonBradley]

Don,

I hope you let us know when your paper is published. I have an interesting link to Joseph's plural marriages. One of my ancestors had a fake marriage with one of Joseph Smith's wives.

Hello, Mr. Kingsbury! ;-)

Earlier someone questioned Joseph Smith practicing polygamy if not for procreation. I may be wrong, but I believe that God teaches line upon line. Thus, I don't believe Joseph fully understood the entire concept of sealings and Polygamy at first. I could be wrong, but I don't thing every detail was explained to him all at once.

Yeah. The argument that was being peddled doesn't hold up. And plainly the understandings did grow with time.

Don

[Dr. Jd]

You caught me.