How often do General Authorities call their relatives to also be General Authorities? A friend asked me this question, and I thought it might be an interesting one to look at. Off the top of my head, I thought the answer would be that this happens a lot. For example, I remember President Hinckley protesting that he had nothing to do with the calling of his son as a Seventy, and I know about historical examples like Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Parley and Orson Pratt, and Bruce R. McConkie being Joseph Fielding Smith’s son-in-law.
To make the question more manageable, I decided to look only at members of the Quorum of the Twelve rather than all GAs. This includes nearly all First Presidency members too because I looked at data at the person level (meaning that each Q12 member was counted only once, versus for example looking at the composition of the Q12 each year or something like that) and nearly all FP members were also Q12 members at one point.
The first analysis I did was kind of a quick-and-dirty approach that I think is nevertheless kind of fun. I listed the last names of all Q12 members, and then checked whether each, at the time of his call, brought a new last name to the Quorum. For example, two Johnson and two Pratts were called in the original Q12, so among the four of them, they brought only two unique last names. In this analysis, I counted Smith as being a duplicate the first time it was used, given that Joseph Smith was the head of the Church, even though he wasn’t a member of the Q12.
The graph below shows, across time, the cumulative count of number of Q12 members called (blue line), and the cumulative count of unique last names for those Q12 members (red line). If every single Q12 member had a unique last name, the two lines would be on top of each other. They separate to the degree that new Q12 members have last names that duplicate last names of previous Q12 members. Note that on the horizontal axis, I separated 1835 out as its own bin, because that’s the year the original Q12 were called. After that, I grouped years into 15-year bins, which I know is a little odd, but the calling of new Q12 members is such an infrequent event that when I used 10-year bins, there were several decades with few to no new calls.
There’s some separation here, indicating new Q12 members who have last names that have already been used, but nearly all of it had taken place by 1950 (the lines are about as far apart for 1936-1950 as they are for 2011-2019). In fact, it has been over three decades since a new Q12 member was called with a non-unique name. The last person to bring a duplicate name was M. Russell Ballard, who copied his grandfather Melvin J. Ballard.
Of course last names don’t tell the whole story. For example, I had always assumed that Lorenzo Snow and Erastus Snow must have been related, especially since they were called into the Q12 at the same time. But it turns out that they were only distant cousins. So I did a second analysis where I noted how closely related each new Q12 member was to any previous Q12 member. Well, to be more precise, what I actually did was to look at Wikipedia’s list of LDS Q12 members, which gives many relationships between members, and then also at each individual member’s Wikipedia page, many of which list additional relationships. In one case, I did track a relationship down on the Church’s website because a shared last name was a strong hint, but mostly I just stuck to what Wikipedia gives. Note that even though they weren’t ever Q12 members, I counted relationships of new Q12 members with Joseph or Hyrum Smith, given that they only failed to be members of the Q12 because they vaulted right over it and held the highest positions in the Church.
Once I had all these relationships listed, I scored each one by the expected percentage of genes that the newly-called member shared with the previous member. My reasoning, as you can probably guess from the title of this post, is that a major (though almost certainly unconscious) reason people help out relatives by doing things like calling them to prominent positions, is to help their own genes to survive better. Here’s a tidbit from the Wikipedia page on The Selfish Gene:
From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense (at the level of the genes) it makes for them to behave selflessly with each other.
Anyway, at the very least, this approach gave me a way to score how close family relationships are, and it accords pretty well with common sense. This is how I scored various relationships:
- Father-son: 50% expected genetic overlap
- Brothers: 50%
- Uncle-nephew: 25% (siblings share 50%, and the child of a sibling shares 50% with the sibling, so 50% x 50% = 25% between uncle and nephew)
- Brother-in-law: 25% (In this case, the brother-in-law himself is expected to share a negligible percentage with the target person, but I calculated distance using his children: the sister shares 50% with the target person, so the sister’s children with the brother-in-law are reduced again by 50% in how much they share with the target person, so 50% x 50% = 25%)
- Cousin: 12.5% (target person and parent share 50%, parent and their sibling share 50%, and sibling and their child [the cousin of the target person] share 50%, so 50% x 50% x 50% = 12.5% for the target person and the cousin)
There are a few other odd cases, but I calculated these using the same rules listed above. For a relative by marriage, I always calculated overlap between the target person and the children of the relative by marriage. For adding generations in a single line, each addition multiplies the overlap by another 50%, so grandparent-grandchild is 50% x 50% = 25%, and so forth.
The graph below shows the average family relationship score using the same year bins as in the graph above.
As we might expect, the overlap was fairly high in the original Q12 (multiple sets of brothers). Then it dropped for a little while, but it jumped to over 30% at the beginning of the Utah period. This is a ridiculously high value. Remember that a father-son or a pair of brothers scores at 50%, so even if half the new Q12 members were sons or brothers of previous members, the average relationship score would be 25%. The level was even five percentage points beyond that. I’m sure a historian who knows about this period could explain the background, but just looking at the data I have, what happened is that Q12 members were competing to pack the Quorum with their sons. From 1866 to 1906, every relationship I found for a new Q12 member was a father-son one.
Anyway, then since the turn of the 20th century, and even more strongly since the end of World War II, the relationship score has fallen off pretty dramatically. I think this change makes sense given the growth of the Church, and the larger numbers of unrelated men available to fill the top positions. (It’s just unfortunate that women can’t also be considered as candidates.)
I should note, though, that I’m definitely understating the extent of the family relationships among General Authorities. First, I’m ignoring relationships between Q12 members and other GAs, like Seventies and members of the Presiding Bishopric. Second, I collected my relationship information by spending a few hours with Wikipedia. A serious researcher could surely turn up more family relationships than I have.
One last thing is that an obvious question a person might ask when looking at these results is whether there’s nepotism going on in callings. My answer is that I don’t really know. The Church was quite small when it started, and many members joined in families, so there were a lot of sets of relatives. I don’t find it too surprising that many early Church leaders were related to one another. I’m also definitely encouraged to see some new unrelated Q12 members called in recent years. But to answer whether there is nepotism going on, I think to answer it well, for comparison I would have to come up with an expected level of average family relationship score in the absence of any nepotism, and that would depend on knowing things like the number of eligible men at any given time in the Church’s history. And I didn’t want to go to the effort of working something like that out. I will say that all the calling of previous Q12 members’ sons in the latter half of the 19th century looks pretty suspicious, but I’m not actually sure without working out some comparison that it was more calling of relatives than would be expected.
Lastly, as the list of Q12 members isn’t all that long, here’s the entire thing, in case you want to let me know of relationships that I’ve missed or critique what I have done. Note that I’ve just left the “relationship” column blank where I couldn’t find a family relationship with a previous Q12 member listed on Wikipedia.
| Name | Year called | Relationship to previous Q12 member | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas B. Marsh | 1835 | ||
| David W. Patten | 1835 | ||
| Brigham Young | 1835 | ||
| Heber C. Kimball | 1835 | ||
| Orson Hyde | 1835 | ||
| William E. McLellin | 1835 | ||
| Parley P. Pratt | 1835 | ||
| Luke Johnson | 1835 | Brother-in-law of Orson Hyde (source) | 25% |
| William Smith | 1835 | Brother of Joseph Smith (source) | 50% |
| Orson Pratt | 1835 | Brother of Parley P. Pratt (source) | 50% |
| John F. Boynton | 1835 | ||
| Lyman E. Johnson | 1835 | Brother of Luke Johnson (source) | 50% |
| John E. Page | 1838 | ||
| John Taylor | 1838 | ||
| Wilford Woodruff | 1839 | ||
| George A. Smith | 1839 | Cousin of Joseph Smith (source) | 12.5% |
| Willard Richards | 1840 | Cousin of Brigham Young (source) | 12.5% |
| Lyman Wight | 1841 | ||
| Amasa M. Lyman | 1842 | ||
| Ezra T. Benson | 1846 | ||
| Charles C. Rich | 1849 | ||
| Lorenzo Snow | 1849 | Brother-in-law of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (source) | 25% |
| Erastus Snow | 1849 | ||
| Franklin D. Richards I | 1849 | Nephew of Willard Richards (source) | 25% |
| George Q. Cannon | 1860 | Nephew (by marriage) of John Taylor (source) | 12.5% |
| Joseph F. Smith | 1866 | Son of Hyrum Smith (source) | 50% |
| Brigham Young Jr. | 1864 | Son of Brigham Young (source) | 50% |
| Albert Carrington | 1870 | ||
| Moses Thatcher | 1879 | ||
| Francis M. Lyman | 1880 | Son of Amasa M. Lyman (source) | 50% |
| John Henry Smith | 1880 | Son of George A. Smith (source) | 50% |
| George Teasdale | 1882 | ||
| Heber J. Grant | 1882 | Son of Jedediah M. Grant (source) | 50% |
| John W. Taylor | 1884 | Son of John Taylor (source) | 50% |
| Marriner W. Merrill | 1889 | ||
| Anthon H. Lund | 1889 | ||
| Abraham H. Cannon | 1889 | Son of George Q. Cannon (source) | 50% |
| Matthias F. Cowley | 1897 | ||
| Abraham O. Woodruff | 1897 | Son of Wilford Woodruff (source) | 50% |
| Rudger Clawson | 1898 | ||
| Reed Smoot | 1900 | ||
| Hyrum M. Smith | 1901 | Son of Joseph F. Smith (source) | 50% |
| George Albert Smith | 1903 | Son of John Henry Smith (source) | 50% |
| Charles W. Penrose | 1904 | ||
| George F. Richards | 1906 | Son of Franklin D. Richards (source) | 50% |
| Orson F. Whitney | 1906 | Grandson of Heber C. Kimball (source) | 25% |
| David O. McKay | 1906 | ||
| Anthony W. Ivins | 1907 | Son-in-law of Erastus Snow (source) | 25% |
| Joseph Fielding Smith | 1910 | Brother of Hyrum M. Smith; son of Joseph F. Smith (source) | 50% |
| James E. Talmage | 1911 | ||
| Stephen L. Richards | 1917 | Grandson of Willard Richards (source) | 25% |
| Richard R. Lyman | 1918 | Son of Francis M. Lyman (source) | 50% |
| Melvin J. Ballard | 1919 | ||
| John A. Widtsoe | 1921 | Grandson-in-law of Brigham Young (source) | 12.5% |
| Joseph F. Merrill | 1931 | Son of Marriner W. Merrill (source) | 50% |
| Charles A. Callis | 1933 | ||
| J. Reuben Clark | 1933 | ||
| Alonzo A. Hinckley | 1934 | ||
| Albert E. Bowen | 1937 | Grandson-in-law of Brigham Young (source) | 12.5% |
| Sylvester Q. Cannon | 1938 | Son of George Q. Cannon (source) | 50% |
| Harold B. Lee | 1941 | ||
| Spencer W. Kimball | 1943 | Grandson of Heber C. Kimball; cousin of Orson F. Whitney and J. Reuben Clark (source) | 25% |
| Ezra Taft Benson | 1943 | Great-grandson of Ezra T. Benson (source) | 12.5% |
| Mark E. Petersen | 1944 | ||
| Matthew Cowley | 1945 | Son of Matthias F. Cowley (source) | 50% |
| Henry D. Moyle | 1947 | ||
| Delbert L. Stapley | 1950 | ||
| Marion G. Romney | 1951 | ||
| LeGrand Richards | 1952 | Son of George F. Richards (source) | 50% |
| Adam S. Bennion | 1953 | ||
| Richard L. Evans | 1953 | ||
| George Q. Morris | 1954 | ||
| Hugh B. Brown | 1958 | ||
| Howard W. Hunter | 1959 | ||
| Gordon B. Hinckley | 1961 | Nephew of Alonzo A. Hinckley (source) | 25% |
| N. Eldon Tanner | 1962 | Nephew of Hugh B. Brown (source) | 25% |
| Thomas S. Monson | 1963 | ||
| Boyd K. Packer | 1970 | ||
| Marvin J. Ashton | 1971 | ||
| Bruce R. McConkie | 1972 | Son-in-law of Joseph Fielding Smith (source) | 25% |
| L. Tom Perry | 1974 | ||
| David B. Haight | 1976 | ||
| James E. Faust | 1978 | ||
| Neal A. Maxwell | 1981 | Cousin (by marriage) of Gordon B. Hinckley (source) | 6.25% |
| Russell M. Nelson | 1984 | ||
| Dallin H. Oaks | 1984 | ||
| M. Russell Ballard | 1985 | Grandson of Hyrum M. Smith and Melvin J. Ballard (source) | 25% |
| Joseph B. Wirthlin | 1986 | Half-cousin of Gordon B. Hinckley (source) | 6.25% |
| Richard G. Scott | 1988 | ||
| Robert D. Hales | 1994 | ||
| Jeffrey R. Holland | 1994 | ||
| Henry B. Eyring | 1995 | Nephew (by marriage) of Spencer W. Kimball (source) | 12.5% |
| Dieter F. Uchtdorf | 2004 | ||
| David A. Bednar | 2004 | ||
| Quentin L. Cook | 2007 | Great-great grandson of Heber C. Kimball (source) | 6.25% |
| D. Todd Christofferson | 2008 | ||
| Neil L. Andersen | 2009 | ||
| Ronald A. Rasband | 2015 | ||
| Gary E. Stevenson | 2015 | ||
| Dale G. Renlund | 2015 | ||
| Gerrit W. Gong | 2018 | ||
| Ulisses Soares | 2018 |
Nepotism can be ruled out for some of these (including most of the recent cases) because the previous relative had already died before the person was called. I recall hearing about more distant relationships among some recent apostles (3rd, 4th, 5th cousins…) but the consanguinity score would be very low, and most of us don’t know our relatives more distant than second cousins. I’ve encountered a few, but generally I meet them in some other context, and only later discover the distant relationship.
Even if there’s not cut-and-dried nepotism, there’s still a significant number of leaders that have been drawn from a smaller, “elect” pool of candidates than the general church membership. I’m sure it would be difficult to track “soft” relationships like business partnerships, geographical proximity, and other less-tangible variables, but I have a hunch that many of these men knew each other, their families, and their greater circles of relationships, and there weren’t many called from outside those circles.
I concur with Bro. Jones. Sometimes we need to look at lower level bureaucrats in their appointments to Church colleges. Example. Henry B Eyring son was appointed as the new President of BYU Idaho. Henry B Eyring was a former President of Ricks College(now BYU Idaho) when I attended there in 1971. It seems to me, that there were many qualified candidates that had applied for the position. So why was his son the one chosen?
And then there’s Elder Holland’s son who was the president of Utah Valley University.
Several Q15 members have/had children/grandchildren in the Q70, as mission Presidents, temple Presidents, BYU and church employees and contractors, etc.
The genetic, direct relative connection you drew is fascinating, but I think there is another story to be told about marriage relationships and the women (frequently honored for their marriage and child-bearing roles) who connect church, business, and politics. For example, it wasn’t HBE’s relationship with HC Kimball per se that would have made modern connections, but the relationship with Camilla Eyring Kimball. And Amelia Smith (Joseph F Smith’s Daughter) married Bruce R McConkie who later joined the Q12 and whose law firm became and still is the church’s outsourced council. Female GAs are also an important consideration (like Ann Dibb, daughter of President Monson, or all of Brigham’s wives and children who served as temple matrons, on hospital boards, in RS, YW, Primary, etc.). Then there’s Jenny Oaks Baker, who has a decade plus of record labels from DB, or Elaine Dalton’s husband who was a major contractor for the church as it built the conference center. I could go on and on.
Why is it that in Mormon communities, being related to a GA often helps one rise to local (non-LDS) power in government or business? Why do those with power surnames use their relationships in advertising and in elections?
While your numbers don’t lie, I’d argue that but nepotism is alive and well. GA families are extremely connected – and even though many of us don’t know our distant relatives, they do. They attend historic stakes together, often go to school, participate in family businesses together, etc. They might be 3rd or 4th cousins, but would still be vested in one another. I know the scope is daunting, potentially impossible, but to draw a conclusion of waxing or waning or consistent nepotism, you might have to expand this excellent work to 70s, female GAs, government, church contracts/employees or potentially sample GA relationships. (I don’t know if a sample would be illuminating- you would!)
And, if that weren’t enough scope creep for the day, I’d suggest that we still have an elite class that is interwoven through business and power circles that could be thicker than blood.
I thought that “Grandpa Bill’s General Authority pages” website used to have a great deal of detail regarding extended familial relationships of GAs (including connections to women), but it seems to have changed. If this info is down, it might be an interesting crowd-sources project to collect.
Thanks for your comments. Several of you mentioned doing a more in-depth analysis that looked at lower-level Church callings. I agree that such an analysis would be much more revealing than what I’ve done here. I’m not sure I even have the energy to look at lower-level GAs, though, so I guess the task for a more serious study will fall to someone else.
I don’t blame you- it would be quite an undertaking to replicate this excellent formula on the Q70, mission/temple presidents, church employees, politicians, etc. I wanted to thank you for this work though, because it DID dispel my previous notions about the Q15. It’s just hard to absorb the facts because I suppose I’m constantly reading in history about family relationships at that level and that construct has been in my head for so long. But that’s what statisticians do best, and kudos to you!
Thanks, Mortimer!