The data for this essay have been compiled from family group sheets and other records of the families who lived in St. George in its first two decades. A first-settlers list and the 1870 and 1880 federal censuses identified the town's families in this period. The Mormon genealogical archives and a volume of genealogies for St. George's settlers were searched for these families' records and nearly 90 percent of the families were found, resulting in a data set which includes the vital events of 2,389 individuals. This essay will focus on the adults in the data set — those who came to St. George as parents, plus those who came of age before 1880.

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There are 181 men and 199 women in the St. George sample who were involved in monogamous first marriages. Monogamous marriages are those in which the husband never took a plural wife. These men may of course have married more than once if the first wife died, but they never had more than one wife at a time. Table 1 shows measures of age at first marriage for monogamous St. George residents compared with two cohorts of once-married couples from the Mormon Demographic History (MDH) project; the latter project is a study of the demographic history of Utah and the "Mormon Trail." St. George residents are divided into those married before and those married after 1860, and the closest MDH cohorts are shown for comparison. The table shows close agreement between St. George and the larger sample. Men were twenty-five and women about twenty in couples marrying before 1860. In the next generation, both sexes married about a year younger in each sample.

Table 2 shows age-at-marriage data from several Eastern states roughly contemporary with the two St. George groups. Both men and women married earlier in St. George than their contemporaries in these five states. The difference is more pronounced for women than men: St. George women married over two years earlier than those in the East, whereas St. George men were about a year younger. These comparisons, taken together with the MDH averages shown in table 1, indicate that St. George monogamous couples differed little from their counterparts throughout the Mormon region in marrying earlier than men or women in the East.

THE INCIDENCE OF POLYGAMY

Determining the extent of plural marriage is a twofold problem. The numerator in a plural-marriage rate, consisting of polygamous individuals, is conceptually straightforward, although the discussion below will point out practical problems in identifying polygamists. The denominator, on the other hand, is conceptually as well as practically difficult. Identifying Mormon men who were "at risk" of becoming polygamists is no easy matter, because the church did not intend plural marriage to be universal. In principle, plural marriage was carefully regulated by the church hierarchy. Church policy required a man who wanted to take a plural wife to consult the church's president, who was to await a divine revelation approving the marriage.

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The top half of table 3 shows plural-marriage rates for St. George households. Instead of the 9 percent incidence found in one study of southern Utah censuses, nearly 30 percent of St. George households were involved in polygamy in 1870 and 33 percent in 1880. This is a much higher polygamous proportion than in any census study to date, but it is more reliable, since it makes full use of the supplemental sources available for determining a husband's status. If the number of households is reduced by 14 percent to allow for husbands who were unlikely to enter polygamy because of their presumed inactivity in the church, over 34 percent of all "eligible" households were polygamous in 1870, as were nearly two in five in 1880. Either method of defining the denominator produces unprecedented rates for plural marriage.

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The first marriages of eighty-four men who later became polygamists are included in the St. George data set, in addition to 192 women whose first marriage was to a current or eventual polygamist. Table 5 shows polygamists' age at first marriage, compared with monogamous first marriages in St. George and with plural marriages from a study which sampled genealogies of Utah pioneers. The differences between St. George polygamists and the sample of pioneers are small; comparison with St. George monogamists, on the other hand, does suggest disparities. Polygamous men married slightly younger and women were a year older than in monogamous marriages. The difference between monogamous and polygamous men, however, is not statistically significant, and the medians for the groups are identical. The difference among St. George women, although it is statistically significant, is likewise modest. Women who married polygamists, though they were typically a year older than monogamous brides, were nonetheless younger than the average in any of the Eastern states shown in table 2.

Data on polygamists' ages when they married later wives indicate that plural marriage was concentrated in a narrow age range. Men in St. George typically waited until their late thirties to make a plural marriage, and most ended their marrying by their early forties (table 6). Only 20 percent of all eventual polygamists in St. George took a plural wife by thirty, and 75 percent of those who married three or fewer wives had all their marriages made by age forty-three; indeed, only two of the eleven men who took a fourth wife did so after age forty-six (these proportions are not shown in table 6). This is a more distinct clustering than in the analysis of Utah pioneers, where the age difference between second and third marriages was over twice as large as in St. George. It is clear that plural marriages in St. George were, as a rule, made in a husband's late thirties and were seldom made more than twice.