A Mormon Mother

Annie Clark Tanner was born in 1864 in Farmington, in the Utah Territory, into a household where plural marriage was part of ordinary family life. As a young woman she entered a polygamous marriage herself, wedding Joseph Marion Tanner in 1883. Over the following years she bore and raised ten children, among them a son who went on to become a prominent businessman in Salt Lake City. Her marriage was marked by hardship, and the couple eventually parted ways. Annie later made her home in California. This account traces a woman's life across the decades of change, from a frontier childhood to the choices she faced as a wife and mother, told through her family and her own reflections.