Andrew Wood Cooley was born May 24, 1837, in McComb County, Michigan. He was the second child of Benjamin and Clarissa Wood Cooley, who had moved to Michigan from New England about 1833.
When he was twenty-one, Cooley married Diana Elizabeth Briggs in St. Claire, Michigan. She was left behind, however, when he traveled West after the outbreak of the Civil War several years later. Cooley arrived in Utah in 1863, and a year later was baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A devout and respected Mormon, in 1867 he was asked by Brigham Young to serve as bishop of the LDS Brighton Ward, a position he held for ten years.
Plural marriages were customary for qualified church elders, and over the course of four years Cooley took four more wives: Mary Huntington on February 17, 1866, Mary Jane Jenkins and Rachel Coon on February 22, 1868, and Ann Hazen on February 14, 1870. Together they bore him thirty-two children, twelve of whom died in childhood.
Cooley was sentenced twice to federal prison and served a total of eleven months for his practice of polygamy. His health broken, he died at the age of fifty on October 11, 1887. Mary, Mary Jane, Rachel, and Ann Cooley followed him in death at the ages of sixty-three, eighty-nine, ninety-one and eighty-eight, respectively.
The photographs in this collection date from approximately 1850 to 1980. They are for the most part those of Andrew Wood Cooley, four of his five wives, and some of their descendants; however, photos of Cooley's mother, sister, and uncle, as well as other individuals related to the Cooley family by marriage, are included.
In addition to the obvious genealogical value of the photographs, a number of them will be of interest to researchers for their format and subject matter. Noteworthy, for example , are two cartes de viste by the important Utah photographer C. R. Savage which Poignantly records the death of Cooley's young daughter, Isabelle, in 1873.
The photographs were received by the university in no discernible order. During processing they were arranged into two sections, the first including photographs of individuals who lived or currently reside in Michigan, and the second consisting of photos of immigrants or individuals native to Utah. Items in both sections were then arranged in folders by family group, the earliest first. Thus, in the second section photographs of Cooley and his second wife are found in folder one, photos of Cooley and his third wife in folder two, those of their children in folder three, and so forth. Oversized materials and photographs of individuals whose relationships to the family are unknown to the processor are found at the end of the collection.
Name Index
Collection is arranged topically and contains one addendum.
Twenty-four hour advanced notice encouraged. Materials must be used on-site. Access to parts of this collection may be restricted under provisions of state or federal law.
The library does not claim to control copyright for all materials in the collection. An individual depicted in a reproduction has privacy rights as outlined in Title 45 CFR, part 46 (Protection of Human Subjects). For further information, please review the J. Willard Marriott Library’s
Collection Name, Collection Number, Box Number, Folder Number. Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah.
Gift of Jay M. Smith.
Processed by Kirk Baddley in 1990 and Mary Ann Curtis in 2000.
Audio-visual materials were transferred to the Andrew Wood Cooley AV Collection, (A0535).
Manuscript materials were transferred to the Cooley family papers (MS 0567).