Why I left - things that broke my shelf

Polygamy and the Martha Brotherton affair My major shelf breaker was the Martha Brotherton affair. Even though I had read Donna Hill’s book ‘Joseph Smith, the first Mormon’ about 20 years ago and had been shocked to the core when I read about the Fanny Alger affair, I had been able to put this on a shelf and accept that the Church which Joseph established was good and true. Several years ago I listed to Lindsay Hanson Park’s great podcast ‘A year of Polygamy’, one of the episodes mentioned very briefly Brigham Young’s proposal to Martha Brotherton, the historian who Lindsay was interviewing didn’t know much about Martha’s background and assumed that she was a poor British convert. Through my past membership in the Church I have become an enthusiastic and competent genealogist and Martha Brotherton’s story wet my appetite as I am also from the British Isles. What I discovered was quite fascinating and was also the final crack in my proverbial shelf. EARLY LIFE AND CONVERSION Mart

Whilst searching for newspaper articles about Martha Brotherton I came across the following article from an Isle of Man newspaper dated May 2 1874. LDS missionaries had decided to revamp the missionary efforts in the Isle of Man (an Island located off the North West coast of England )and had hired a hall to present their message. At the end of their presentation an elderly man came forward to share his warning about the Mormons, he then read a statement from a Mr. William Hill, formerly a respectable shopkeeper in Manchester, whom the old man had known, and who had, in his hearing repeated the statement. The first half of this statement I will discuss in my next blog as it contains several other cans of worms in which to go into and in this particular Blog I want to concentrate on William Hill’s own personal and harrowing experiences. The following is a quotation from William Hill’s statement as recorded in the above mentioned Newspaper - “Hill, in relating his own personal exp