One, two, three, go.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Feminist Mormon Housewives podcast.

I'm our host, Lindsay, bringing you another episode in the Europe, Ligami series,

where we seek to understand the practice of Mormon plural marriage.

I'm really excited because I've been trying to arrange this interview for a while now,

and I have brought you a gift.

The gift I'm giving you is historian Jeffrey Johnson, the biographer and researcher

for a lot of the wives of Brigham Young's wives. And I'm hoping that he can help us contextualize

and understand them through their stories a little bit here tonight. So Jeffrey, can you say hello,

please? Hello. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in this topic?

Sure.

I grew up in central Utah in a very small town on a cattle ranch.

I went to B.Y.U.

The Heelman Halls had more people in the dorm than I had in my hometown.

But I enjoyed BYU, and I went on a mission to the southern states.

When I got home, I decided to get a job, and I was able to get a job at the library in the special collections cataloging manuscripts.

And I loved it. It was so great to get to know these people who, many of them long dead, that I got to read the manuscripts and catalog them for the library.

Through that association, staff of the church historian's office would come down and I got to know them.

So when I graduated, I had had some plans of going to graduate school,

but they had an opening, so I thought I would apply for it.

And I was hired at the church historian's office.

I had taken library classes at BYU and history classes.

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