In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith revealed a new temple liturgy and cosmology that incorporated the idea of sealing people together into a durable and eternal network of heaven. There were a lot of loose ends in the practical reality of sealing practice when he was killed. The Quorum of the Twelve instituted the practice of “adoption” (also sometimes referred to as the “law of adoption”)—sealing men and women to people other than their biological parents—when the temple opened for use by the Saints. This practice endured until 1894, when the church president Wilford Woodruff received a revelation mostly ending the practice. [n1]

There are persistent misunderstandings about adoptive sealings, and I thought it would be good to delve into the historiography a bit. The two most prominent issues I continue to see are 1) the assertion that the Quorum of the Twelve and other leaders were sealed to Joseph Smith; and 2) there were adoptions and/or child-to-parent sealings performed outside of the temple, and particularly on the trail West. The former is generally relegated to informal publications and Wikipedia. The latter gets traction in peer reviewed publications, including the most recent volume of Saints. [n2]

Sixty years ago, we simply had people bumping into examples of adoption sealings being performed or references to them in various journals, letters, and sermons. There was not systematic treatment, and scholars did their best to situate what they were reading. Juanita Brooks, spent a lot of time with John D. Lee and Hosea Stout. In her biography of Lee and her volume of Stouts journals she made the following statements that have probably been cited in more publications than anything else on the history of adoption:

“The idea behind it was that in establishing the Kingdom of God upon the earth there should be also a celestial relationship. If the Prophet Joseph were to become a God over a minor planet, he bust not only have a large posterity but able assistants of practical skills. Brigham Young had been “sealed” to Joseph under this law.” [n3]

“Joseph Smith had sealed to himself a number of his most faithful followers, among them the first members of the Council of Fifty, to help establish the Kingdom of God upon this earth and to share his exaltation hereafter.” [n4]

The problem, of course, is that she appears to have either just made these statements up, or she was repeating ideas in circulation at the time that people believed, but that just weren’t true. Joseph clearly wasn’t sealed to the quorum of the twelve or any other church leaders, and Brigham was quite clear that he hadn’t been sealed to anyone as child. [n5]

In a journal entry dated August 4, 1972 Leonard Arrington wrote about various theological justifications for plural marriage, and summarized his perceptions of adoption. He repeated several of the common mistaken ideas, including the idea that women were not adopted. He concludes noting that he had “asked Gordon Irving to do a preliminary study on the Law of Adoption, and we may later have someone else pay his respects to this practice—not necessarily for publication, but to enable us to see the parameters of the problem and see what will be involved.” [n6]

One of the documents that Irving accessed is called “Sealings and Adoption, 1846–1857” [n7]. Lisle Brown identified this document as being compiled by Joseph F. Smith in 1869 and 1870. It is a multipart register of Sealings in the Nauvoo temple—marriage, child-to-parent, and adoptions. It also includes a list of people who had agreed to be sealed to Brigham Young’s family in the future when possible. Smith appears to have extracted the information from the original Nauvoo Temple documents. [n8] Irving then extracted the information in this document, a typescript of which is in the Arrington Papers at USU.

This extract may have been, as Arrington wrote in his diary, an internal summary and position paper. After the typescript registers and summaries, it includes a list of seven “Problems, Comments, Conclusions.” The following three dealt with Nauvoo and the subsequent decade, and perhaps highlighted areas of conflict between anticipated data and actual data:

• There appeared to be lacunae in the document. There were no adoptions for John D. Lee, Joseph Smith, and most of the apostles that were living during that time.
• Very few Adoptions were performed in Nauvoo.
• The document indicated that “adoptions were not performed after the Saints left Nauvoo. The only adoptions recorded are for 1846, with a waiting list being made up during the years 1847-54.” He counted 449 people on this list (though he only reported 175 in his published article)

Let’s take a few moments to respond to each of these. John D. Lee was indeed an adoptive father. [n9] There is evidence that even on the trail west, some of the people were so dissatisfied with him that they dissolved their covenants with him. Moreover by the time the register was created, Lee’s involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre was well known. Regardless, Smith did not include adoptions involving him. Moving on, there was actually a single adoption performed to Joseph Smith (and the only one without an adoptive mother), but it was recorded in the “Book of Proxey,” which Smith did not use to produce his register. [n10] And despite popular belief, there just weren’t any other adoptions (though there were more adoptions than child-to-parent sealings). This was a big reality check, one which hasn’t universally occurred to many folks. Here is the data of all these Nauvoo sealings from my article:

The last observation (adoptions were only performed in the temple) similarly has found resistance in the scholarly community, though it is hard for me to understand why. I hadn’t seen these comments before writing my article, but I document a lot of evidence for it beyond the analysis of this particular document. BY frequently discussed how adoptions and child-to-parent sealings were explicitly reserved to temples (even the Endowment House was insufficient). Wilford Woodruff, as well, noted that he hadn’t ever seen an adoption or child-to-parent sealing performed until the St. George Temple was complete in 1877.

But old ideas are hard to shake. When Irving published the fruits of his labors in his extremely important “The Law of Adoption” article in 1974, [n11] he still cited Brooks and repeated some of the old canards. Richard Bennett, who has been one of our most prolific experts on the Trail West, repeated the idea that church leaders performed hundreds of adoptions in Winter Quarters without documentation. [n12] Over the last several years, he has also published several articles on the history of the temple liturgy, culminating in his important 2019 monograph, Temples Rising. Bennett oddly claimed that scores if not hundreds of primarily young men chose to be adopted in Joseph Smith’s family, and that women were only rarely adopted (“in rare cases, an unmarried, widowed, or divorced female”). [n13] He also claimed that “a total of 320 men and women (a small number of whom were deceased), many with their children, were adopted to Brigham Young alone between 1847 and 1854.” [n14] Bennett did not include any documentation for these claims. [n15]

I haven’t gone through and counted, but my sense is that Bennett’s “320 men and women, many with their children” adopted between 1847 and 1854, were the people Irving counted on the waiting list that covered those exact same years. I’ve also checked numerous manuscript sources that I don’t think Irving ever accessed and I’ve never seen a single evidence of an adoption performed outside of the temple. [n16] The other details about Joseph Smith, and only men being adopted, appear to be repetitions of old beliefs.

Anyway, now you know. [n17]
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1. See my article, “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism” and Ch. 2 of Power of Godliness for in depth treatments of the topic.
2. Ch. 3 of Saints vol. 2, explains that “since leaving Nauvoo, the apostles had continued to perform spiritual adoptions among the Saints.” And ch. 4 describes the travelling companies: “These companies were composed mostly of families that had been sealed by adoption to Brigham Young and Heber Kimball.”
3. Juanita Brooks, John Doyle Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1962), 73.
4. Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Diaries of Hosea Stout, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,1964), 1:178 note 50.
5. “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” 59 note 13, and the rest.
6. Gary Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard Arrington, 1971-1997, 3 vols, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018), 218-19.
7. (ca. 1869–70), microfilm 183374, Special Collections, LDS Family History Library; photocopy in Accn 2113, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah. The noticeable lacunae is the absence of John D. Lee’s adoptions, some or all of which were apparently canceled in his lifetime.
8. The Nauvoo Temple “Book of Adoptions & Sealings of Parents & Children” has, as far as I am able to tell, not been accessed by scholars for any published work.
9. For documentation of Lee’s adoption see Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo Endowment Companies,1845–1846: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 585–86. I have never seen this document or even a catalog registry for it, so I’m taking it on faith for now.
10. ”Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” 68 n32.
11. Gordon Irving, ”The Law of Adoption: One Phase of the Development of the Mormon Concept of Salvation, 1830–1900” BYU Studies 14:3. This issue had an image of the Keepappitchinin newspaper on its cover. So that is cool.
12. Richard Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 190–91; Richard Bennett, “We’ll Find the Place”: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 82–83. See “Adoptive Sealing Ritual in Mormonism,” 74 n53.
13. Richard Bennet, Temples Rising: A Heritage of Sacrifice, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 126-127.
14. Ibid., Richard Bennett, “The Upper Room”: The Nature and Development of Latter-day Saint Temple Work, 1846-55,” Journal of Mormon History 41 (April 2015), 33.
15. Look, I am entirely sympathetic with the challenge of managing footnotes. I reviewed my recent book multiple times, and still errors crept through the process. So I’m not trying to be a jerk here. Besides not documenting claims, four of the footnotes point mistaken documents.
16. E.g., Endowment House, Pre-Endowment House Ordinances, 1847– 1854 Manuscript Books, CR334 13, fds. 1–2, LDS Church History Library. These records sometimes include transcripts of letters requesting adoption. See also records in April 26, 1846 in Brigham Young account book, 1846 February-August, MS 19826, CHL; Kelly, The Journal of John D. Lee, 198; Brigham Young Office Papers, CR 1234, Box 64, fd. 32, CHL. In note 35 of Temple Rising Bennett points to “Brigham Young Papers, 21 November 1847,” as evidence for an adoption. I’m unaware of any document in the BY collection that is indicative of such activity or related document from that date. There is a document from “Church historian’s office, general minutes” from that date that includes documentation for a marriage sealing and a discussion of adoption, but it doesn’t document any adoptions.
17. If you haven’t checked out the church’s “Now You Know” videos, they are surprisingly good. See, e.g., the one on Seer Stones.