Help! Miles Romney's profile is a mess! [closed]

Question

The first I ever heard about the LDS Mexican Colonias was in the political context regarding whether Mitt Romney's father George, born in Mexico @ an LDS Colonia, should have been eligible to run for US President. It came up again when I recently added & connected Cliven Bundy, the anti-government Nevada rancher, to the tree, and found that he, too, had links to the Colonias. So I decided to look into it more, even creating (with help) a Category which now has nearly 200 profiles listed.

And, I've gotten to the Romneys regarding that project. Enough of them went to Mexico that I figured I'd spend a little time reviewing the whole clan. Several of them have Wiki pages, so they're Notables, too. Miles Romney b. 1807 in England, emigrated to the US and was an LDS Pioneer & Notable. Miles' parents did not emigrate, and I do not know about his siblings. So, working from Miles, his WikiTree profile shows 14 wives. One "marriage" was a century before his UK birth - in Connecticut! One "wife" was born the year after he died. Both will become orphan profiles when/if disconnected. Another wedding came when he was 12 years old. The other 11 marriages are all listed in the bio abt. 1828-30 with the only location being England. One wife's profile has her LNAB as Romney, but it more likely was something else. Wife Elizabeth Gaskell, b. 1809, does not have an open privacy setting on her profile. The estimated birthdates & places for all the wives, in England, are probably wrong; I presume most of the marriages occurred in Utah, although I also don't presume that all of them occurred. (Did the GEDCOM make helpful guesses for us on those?) Only one of the wives has any chidlren listed. So, we've got plenty of room for profile improvement. These problems aside from the usual challenges in sorting out plural LDS families.

Miles' profile arrived in a GEDCOM whose only source is listed as: Miles Romney Family Organization c/o Ralph B. Romney, 3356 Monte Verde Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84109; Archive Record Nov 1971. The Profile Manager associated with the profiles in this GEDCOM made his last contribution to WikiTree over a year ago.

This one will take some work to sort out. I suppose I'll be on it for awhile. Anyone else wants to pitch in, please do!

Comments

If I recall correctly, profiles with a birth date over 200 years ago (she was born in 1809) are supposed to be open privacy. I have put in a request to have her profile opened up.

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Yes, I did the same. Just one of many particulars in this case that are indubitably wrong.

Answer 1

Wow - it is messed up... here's what I posted to the profile:

According to Wikipedia - he married Elizabeth Gaskell on November 16, 1830. I see no other marriages from this batch that make sense.

Analyzing Gaskell family: Elizabeth Gaskell (b: 8 January 1809 in Dalton in Furness, Lancashire, England) - daughter of Joseph Gaskell and Elizabeth Slater. Siblings: Bridget (b: 1795), Abraham (b: 1798), Joseph (b: 1800), Hannah (b: 1801), Mary (b: 1803), Jane (b: 1804), Mary (b:1813), Eleanor (b: 1814), Joseph (b: 1819). It is rather peculiar that the Gaskill's mentioned on the profile as "wives" have exactly the same names as Elizabeth's sisters. The birth dates don't line up well, but I don't think this is a coincidence. If we agree that all the Gaskill's are in fact her siblings with slightly incorrect dates, then we can repurpose those profiles to clean those up.

This still leaves Bella Gaskell, Agnes King, Dorothy Atkinson, Bridget Fisher, Ann King, Margaret Romney, Ellen Slater, Bridget Atkinson, and Elizabeth Fisher to address.

We have 2 Atkinsons, 2 Kings, and 2 Fishers, plus an odd Gaskell. We also have a Romney, which could be a husband name or a relative of Miles. Ellen Slater is the odd woman out. I'll do a bit more digging and see what turns up.

Comments

Hah - I should have read your comments more closely. You already speculated that the birth dates were a bit off - therefore, I propose that when Elizabeth's profile is opened, we rename what appears to be her sisters, disconnect them as wives, reattach them to Elizabeth's parents, and merge them with the existing set of sisters.

At least it's a start.

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There is an Eleanor Slater who is the maternal aunt of Elizabeth Gaskell - maybe this is the link to the wife Ellen Slater?

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You've gotten ahead of me, Scott. I've been busy cleaning extraneous clutter out of the profiles and putting in Trusted List requests. I had to leave those birth dates because WikiTree requires a birth or death date, even though I'm confident they're wrong.

Some of those founding Mormon patriarchs took a LOT of wives, and kept taking new ones all through life. The more wives, the greater your reward in heaven was the theology. Zera Pulsipher, for example, married a 14 year old girl in his late 60s. I expect that most of Miles Romney's marriages were polygamist and occurred in Utah, and that several wives were much younger than he was, even by decades. Even if he didn't marry all 14 of the women listed, he could well have married the majority of them.

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Try this link - it appears he did marry 11 polygamist wives. So perhaps what we need to do is research each marriage and just document them properly.

http://www.orsonprattbrown.com/Romney/miles-romney1806-1877.html

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Hmm... another twist -

https://familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&section=details&person=KWJT-12S

Read the first note at the bottom of the profile:

Note

 

Many of us will have family records of Miles Romney being married to not only his real wife, Elizabeth Gaskell, but also 11 additional "wives." The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is asking us not to include these additional 11 wives as real wives in FamilySearch.org or in our own records because they were proxy wives that were part of an "adoption sealing" process that was ended in the late 1880’s by President Wilford Woodruff. This adoption sealing was an imperfect understanding of the sealing of husbands and wives and their children. This is why these additional "wives" are not listed here as wives. According to the Church guidelines "We should not use these ‘adoptions' in any way as evidence for historical family relationships.”

You will find some internet sites and some family history books writing in these “wives” as spouses, even with marriage and sealing dates, but this is not the case. Often the marriage dates are either the marriage date to their original husband or was a date referring to the adoption sealing, such "as after 1830” married to Miles Romney. Miles Romney had no children with these women and neither are they considered plural wives.

Additional reading on the matter:
- "An ancestor is sealed to an unrelated early Church leader” - https://familysearch.org/ask/productSupport#/An-ancestor-is-sealed-to-an-unrelated-early-Church-leader-1381815024862
- The Roots of Family History, Elder D. Todd Christofferson, BYU Family History Fireside - Joseph Smith Building, March 3, 2000 - https://familyhistory.byu.edu/pdf/firesides/2000-03-03.pdf

The women listed as these proxy "wives" are:

- Ann King (b. 1784 England)
- Margaret Romney (b. 1810 Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England)
- Ellen Slater (b. 1810, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England)
- Bridget Gaskill (b. 1795, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England; c. 22 April 1795, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England — d. 23 July 1866)
- Hannah Gaskill (b. 1801, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England; c. 8 November 1801, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England — d. 30 April 1863)
- Mary Gaskill (b. 1803, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England)
- Dorothy Atkinson (b. 1808, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England; c. 6 November 1808, Chester Le Street, Durham, England)
- Bridget Atkinson (b. about 1806, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England; c. 19 November 1806, Cathedral, Manchester, Lancashire, England)
- Elizabeth Fisher (b. about 1806, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England; c. 19 November 1806, Cathedral, Manchester, Lancashire, England)
- Bridget Fisher (b. 1810, England)
- Bella Gaskill (b. about 1806, Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire, England

It is believed the proxy adoption sealing took place in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City on 6 May 1872 with none of these women present and most, if not all, dead by the time these adoption sealings took place.

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So, after reading this - I'm more inclined to remove them and add a similar note to his profile. It sounds like they were neither legal marriages nor were they considered church acceptable unions of man and wife, but more of an imperfect "adoption" as a plural relationship - I guess it's hard to explain. But it sounds like neither the government nor the church accepted these as marriages and so perhaps we shouldn't either.

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Thanks for looking all that up, Scott. I don't want to detach them right away, especially since we don't know much about them. At least with this unusual non-connection connection, we know that much about them. If they'e to become unconnected profiles, it would be better if there were more information about them first. Don't you agree?

They are somewhat of a side interest to me, since my  primary interest here is the Mexican Colonias. If it weren't for the Mormon strong interest in genealogy, it'd be even harder to sort all these out.

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I would agree that we shouldn't disconnect them too quickly, but I would consider removing them one-by-one, but adding links within the biography of each prior to disconnecting, as they do share a non-spousal relationship of sorts and it should be recorded somewhere.

And I would also agree - I would hope that there's more to tell about these 11 other than they were mysteriously "adopted" into this relationship at some point in what it appears (facts are still a bit lacking) late in his life, with little information as to why this was done, or whether they had previous lives. I believe there are a few biographies of him around, but from what I've seen, they're very pricey (only one available on Amazon that I could find, and it was $150) - I might try to order a copy from the local library.

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Well - at least one answer.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18422949

• One real wife, Elizabeth Gaskell, married 1830 in Dalton-in-Furness
• Nine proxy wives (all dead) married 6 May 1872 in Endowment House, Salt Lake City - Ellen Slater, Bridget Gaskill, Hannah Gaskill, Mary Gaskill, Dorothy Athinson, Bridget Athinson, Elizabeth Fisher, Bridget Fisher, Bella Fisher
• Two more proxy wives (also dead) married two days later - Ann King, Margaret Romney

So all these women were deceased at the time of their "marriage" as proxy wives. Interesting.

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And more from that article that explains why they did these proxy wives:

Miles Romney is listed as having nine children with Elizabeth, and a total of 12 wives.

But the 11 wives after Elizabeth are not wives in the usual sense of the word - all were dead by the time of the marriages, in 1872, five years before Miles died.

Most, if not all, appear to be dead relatives of Miles and Elizabeth from Dalton-in-Furness.

Jan Shipps, one of the leading experts on the early Mormon Church, says these were most likely "proxy marriages" - the "proxy" referring to the fact that one party to the marriage was not physically present, and would have been represented by a stand-in.

"For a Mormon man, the more wives he had, the higher he stood in the hierarchy. This would have given Miles Romney more standing in heaven," says Shipps.

No-one says I'm English-American - it's the great hidden identity in America

Tim Stanley, Oxford University

Such unions were "fairly common practice at the time," adds Todd Compton, Mormon historian and authority on polygamy within the church.

In day-to-day life it would have meant "almost nothing", he says, but Miles had nevertheless made "a very serious commitment that he would be a polygamist in the afterlife".

Craig Foster, a genealogist and historian in Salt Lake City, and co-author of The Mormon Quest for the Presidency, interprets it as "an act of love" on Miles' part.

"I firmly believe that what was in his head was an act of love - he was concerned for his departed ancestors who did not have the chance of marriage. I seriously doubt he ever considered them full wives."

Proxy marriages and baptism of the dead are still part of Mormon practice - a way, Mormons believe, of ensuring that families can meet and be reunited to live together in the afterlife. But proxy marriages, where one is dead and the other is alive, are now "absolutely uncommon" says Foster.

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Well, I guess I can dispense with at least a few of them. His "wife" Bridget Gaskill is arguably Elizabeth's sister, Miles' SIL. So I can unconnect as wife, and merge with the sister. One down, a dozen or so more to go! This might be related to the general policy of "baptizing" dead people into the LDS Church, like there was a kerfuffle about that happening to Anne Frank some years back.

It's a start. And a note in the merged profile might be in order, too, so some well-meaning person won't go and attach her again.

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Thanks so much for finding this, Scott. It hasn't cleared all of it up, but you have identified the heart of the problem. Progress!!

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Looking around on WikiTree, before I start looking elsewhere, I have found that Elizabeth Gaskell has two aunts perhaps of relevance here:

Mary (Slater) Atkinson - no dates
Jane (Slater) Fisher - again, no dates

Also, Miles Romney's maternal grandmother was called Agnes King, so I disconnected and merged there. Those relations are an obvious place to start looking for Ann King. As to Caroline Cottam, there's hints that she was born later. It's possible she might not be an English relation like all the others are. But there's some sense of where to look on the rest.

Again: Thanks so much Scott. Your assistance has made a difference.

But this, at least, puts us amongst some Atkinsons and Fishers who were fairly close relations. Will probably have to look beyond WikiTree for answers.

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A couple of possibilities:

https://familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&section=details&person=KWN2-HP4

She's born around the right time,and in Utah, but not in Salt Lake.

There's also this one:

https://familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&section=details&person=MSLK-H4N

But no clues on this one, and it's possible it's a duplicate of the other

And if she was from England, maybe this one:

https://familysearch.org/tree/#view=ancestor&section=details&person=MSVP-SVZ

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Oh, heck. I have to sign up for an account to see those links. (Maybe later?) Anyhow, there's only two left. I've got the rest covered.

Only Ann King & Caroline Cottam remain.

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OK, then. Found new homes for all of them. On to the next puzzle!