Sylvia Sessions Lyon’s daughter Josephine Lyon signed an affidavit relating a conversation with her mother, Sylvia, that had occurred in 1882 during her mother’s final illness:
Just prior to my mother’s death in 1882 she called me to her bedside and told me that her days on earth were about numbered and before she passed away from mortality she desired to tell me something which she had kept as an entire secret from me and from all others but which she now desired to communicate to me. She then told me that I was the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith, she having been sealed to the Prophet at the time that her husband Mr. Lyon had was out of fellowship with the Church.1
This has been interpreted as a sexual relationship. However, when contextualized to 1882, two problems emerge. First, in 1877 the St. George Temple opened where genetically unrelated men and women were sealed to become fathers and daughters. It is unclear from this secondhand account which Sylvia was referring to. Second, polyandry would have been an explosive practice suggesting that additional unambiguous evidence would have been found discussing it. In Nauvoo, no one complained about it or defended the practice. That this was instead a non-sexual eternity-only (just applying after death) sealing is highly probable.
- Josephine R. Fisher, Statement, February 24, 1915, CHL. (back)