While the rest of the world celebrated the end of WWII, Margit, along with her fellow ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia, experienced the backlash and retaliation from her countrymen, the Czechs. Stripped of all human and civil rights, she and her family were sent to Germany, where out of the rubble and dust, she scraped out a new life, a new beginning. All along, she was searching for the peace that she had known as a child., but it did not come until years later. Moving to the United States and joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped, but it was not until she...

In this candid, balanced account of the practice of plural marriage early in the history of the Mormon Church, Charlotte Cannon Johnston focuses on the lives of her four great-grandmothers and other women in her family who faced the challenges of plural marriage. She uses their lives as a springboard to discuss the reasons for and characteristics of polygamy for the fifty-some years it was practiced in the early Church and the repercussions of the practice that continue today.