Church records offer rare look inside polygamist families
The AP has this report that begins:
Hand-scrawled records taken from a polygamist sect are helping untangle the spider-web network of family relationships at the Yearning For Zion ranch, where some husbands had more than a dozen wives.
The church records offer a peek into an intricate culture in which men related to the sect’s prophet, Warren Jeffs, enjoyed favored-husband status in the distribution of wives and all young women were married by 24.
An Associated Press analysis of the records, which authorities seized in a raid last month, show that by the time a girl reached 16, she was more likely to be married than to live as a child in her father’s household. The same was not true for boys . . .