Emily Dow Partridge: Daughter of the First Bishop, Plural Wife, Pioneer — 'Mormonism Came and Changed Everything'

Emily Dow Partridge (February 28, 1824 – December 9, 1899) was the third daughter of Edward Partridge — the first bishop of the Church — and Lydia Clisbee Partridge. She was raised in a home of extraordinary faith and sacrifice.

After her father's death in 1840, Emily and her sister Eliza were taken into the home of Joseph and Emma Smith in Nauvoo. Emily later recalled that this period transformed her understanding of the gospel. In 1843, at the age of 19, she was sealed to Joseph Smith as a plural wife.

In her personal memoir 'What I Remember,' written in 1884, Emily described watching the gospel reshape her family's comfortable life in Ohio: 'But when Mormonism came...' — and it cost them everything. Her father gave his all to the Church, was tarred and feathered by mobs in Missouri, suffered repeated persecutions, and died a broken but faithful man in Nauvoo in 1840.

After Joseph Smith's martyrdom, Emily was married to Brigham Young as a plural wife in Nauvoo. She crossed the plains with the pioneer company and settled in the Salt Lake Valley, where she raised her family and remained a faithful witness to the Restoration.

In 1892, at the age of 68, Emily voluntarily gave sworn testimony in the Temple Lot Case — under oath, and at personal cost — affirming that Joseph Smith had taught and practiced plural marriage as a principle of the gospel, and that she had been sealed to him. Her testimony under oath, decades after the events, remains one of the most significant firsthand legal testimonies about the Nauvoo period of the Church.