He practiced plural marriage; he married Sarah Louisa Smith in 1878, Celia Dibble in 1884, and Margaret Ship in 1890. In 1889 he served six months in Utah territorial prison for "unlawful cohabitation".
He served three proselyting missions: Iowa, Nebraska and southern states from 1880 to 1882; southern states from 1883 to 1886; and Britain from 1886 to 1888.
He was ordained to the First Council of Seventy on October 1888.
He was elected as a representative on the Democratic Party ticket to the fifty_sixth Congress, but the United States House of Representatives prohibited him from taking the seat to which he had been elected and denied Utah of its representative on the grounds of his practice of polygamy.
He was a prolific writer and author of some notable historical, biographical and theological works. He wrote A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter_day Saints which was printed as a series in Americana (a monthly periodical published by the "American Historical Society" of New York) from June 1909 to July 1915 and updated to 1930 when it was published.
Roberts) was a leader, historian, and "defender of the faith" of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Roberts served three proselyting missions: Iowa, Nebraska and southern states from 1880 to 1882; as president of the southern states mission from 1883 to 1886; and Britain from 1886 to 1888.
Roberts later stated that the error may have saved his life, as a mob was waiting for him on the correct road.
Although Roberts was effectively able to quote the early published opinions of that document's discoverers (Rice and Fairchild) to the benefit of the Mormon cause, he ignored subsequent published statements issued by these men ameliorating their preliminary notions regarding the manuscript.
Roberts then said little to contradict or usefully expand upon what George Reynolds had to say in 1883 and what Joseph F. Smith wrote in 1900, and thus, once again, minimized his opportunity to investigate closely and relate in detail what those early witnesses had to say.
Roberts' statements, as published in LDS journals in 1888 and again in 1905 should today be read only as a prelude to his better informed and more careful article writing in 1908 and 1909.
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