Comments about ‘Abigail 'Nabby' Howe Young: In the words and life of my mother’

Very nice story, Abigail is my great great great grandmother and there is information that we descendants are able to have, because she had a son that was a Prophet. I am not through his line, but I am grateful to know of his parents and to have a glimpse into who they were.

I love ready another person's genealogy. Thank you for sharing a glimps into the past.

While I greatly appreciated the biographical details on Brigham Young's mother, I find Ms. McCloud's portrayal of Young's view of women facile and inaccurate. While he did hold some women "in the highest, most tender regard" etc., his relationship with women was in fact far more complex and controversial.

Brigham Young's 35year relationship with wife Augusta Cobb, for example, was extremely rancorous and in her letters to him, she reminded him that he beat and whipped her. McCloud having shown that Brigham's father physically abused him, no wonder he resorted to violence against an unruly wife, as the abused so often become abusers. Also, wives who displeased Brigham were exiled to hard manual labor at the "Farm House", where the punished wives worked demanding hours cooking and cleaning for all the laborers there. Emily Partridge Young was exiled there for one year in 1869; the constant, crushing physical labor disabled her for years. Ann Eliza Webb Young also confirmed, "every one of the wives who had been compelled to live there had become confirmed invalids before they left the place, broken down by overwork." Thus Youngs relationship to women was more complicated than McCloud leads us to believe.

Interesting how it seems that only one person has all this "inside" information on Brigham Young. But wasn't this article about his mother? Love how people just have to take whatever door they can sneak in and do a slam about something that is not even the topic. My dad slapped me a couple of times when I was mouthing off to him, I figured out my self defense, but I do not esteem him as a terrible man for what was probably less then 1% of my life. He was a wonderful father and I was a mouthy teen.