Ellie Hancock: Learning About Church History Through The Eyes of Wilford Woodruff

Videographer: Vincent Pelina

Speaker: Ellie Hancock

Young Adult Interviews

Transcript

I'm Ellie Hancock, and I'm a editorial assistant on the journals team at the Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation. So I'm interested in this project because I wanted to learn more about church history, and Wilford Woodruff is a great person to learn about church history from because he joined the church when Joseph Smith was a prophet and he led the church into the 20th century, and so he covers a huge span of church history, and so it's really fascinating to learn about it through his eyes.

One of the hard topics that my generation specifically struggles with is polygamy. As a woman, it's kind of hard to see how polygamous relationships worked and it kind of feels weird, and so I think it's given me a new perspective to learn about polygamy through someone who practiced polygamy and also through his wives and the relationships they had with his wives and how church doctrine influenced that part of church history.