Our Pioneer Grandmothers Deserve Better Than “Wife Number Three”

(This post was originally published on X by “The Eternal Saints” and is shared here with permission.)

A few days ago, during the online discussion about plural marriage sparked by the Come, Follow Me lesson on Doctrine and Covenants 132, I saw a post that stayed with me.

The author, well-meaning, not malicious, essentially said that polygamy must have been good because without it she wouldn’t exist. “Hooray for wife number three,” she wrote.

I understood the instinct to be lighthearted, but the phrasing felt like a symptom of something deeper in Utah Latter-day Saint culture: a fog of amnesia about the actual women whose names and stories we’ve gradually misplaced.

That amnesia can come from embarrassment about polygamy, reluctance to appear elitist about pioneer ancestry, or simply distance from the past. But whatever the source, the result is the same: we reduce extraordinary women to numbers in a marital sequence, making it easier for critics to cast them as victims.

The only honest response is to tell their stories.

One of my own pioneer grandmothers was a plural wife. Her name was Gertrude Patersdatter, and she came from Denmark. She resisted the Church at first when her husband met the missionaries serving under Erastus Snow. But she eventually embraced the gospel, and she, her husband, and their children entered the waters of baptism.

What followed would test anyone. The family faced harsh persecution in Denmark before deciding to gather with the Saints in America. Only her father came to see them off; the rest of her family had rejected her faith.

Then, on the voyage across the Atlantic, her husband and two sons died. When the ship reached St. Louis, Gertrude discovered that everything they owned had been stolen.

She arrived in America a grieving widow with a single child and no resources; but she kept moving. She still made the long journey from St. Louis to Salt Lake City.

The record doesn’t say how she met my pioneer grandfather, Mads Jensen, but we know they were sealed by Brigham Young. Mads, Gertrude, and Mads’s first wife were later called by Lorenzo Snow to help establish Brigham City and develop the early consecration system that shaped later Church practice.

Gertrude had seven children with Mads, the third son was my great-great-great-grandfather, Mads Peter Jensen. Mads eventually married four wives and fathered thirty children, becoming one of the main patriarchs of an entire town.

Gertrude helped raise not only her own children but those of the other wives, building a plural household that required constant cooperation, sacrifice, and faith. When the federal government launched its crackdown on plural marriage, the cost of obedience rose sharply.

Mads was arrested and tried in Ogden for unlawful cohabitation, but the jury refused to convict him because locals knew him as one of the kindest men they had ever met. Still, the threat remained, and to protect the family he eventually had to send Gertrude away in her old age to a small home in Mantua where she could live without endangering him.

I think about that often. Not everyone escaped prison time; even Lorenzo Snow served years behind bars. But Gertrude and the rest of the family and the Saints in Brigham City endured.

Today people sometimes talk about our pioneer grandmothers as if they were powerless. But Gertrude crossed an ocean, buried a husband and child, lost every possession she owned, walked across the frontier, built a city, raised a plural family, and stayed faithful when the government threatened to dismantle her world.

She was not “wife number two.” She was a disciple, a mother, and a woman of astonishing conviction. If we want to honor the women of the Restoration, the least we can do is speak their names and remember their stories; so we can decide for ourselves whether they were victims, or the greatest Latter-day Saints who ever lived.

*Do you have a story of an ancestor that was a plural wife? If you would like to share their story, please email us at info@calledtoshare.com.