served as the eighth general president of the Relief Society from 1940 to 1945. Apostleship Lyman was ordained an apostle on April 7, 1918. As an apostle, he served as a member of the superintendency of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association until 1935. Excommunication In 1943, the First Presidency discovered that Lyman had long been cohabiting with a woman other than his legal wife. In 1925, Lyman began his relationship with Anna Jacobsen Hegsted, which he defined as a plural marriage. Unable to trust anyone to officiate at the wedding due to the church's ban on the practice, Lyman and Hegsted exchanged vows secretly. By 1943, both were in their seventies. Lyman was excommunicated on November 12, 1943, at age 72; at the time, his legal wife, Amy B. Lyman, was the general president of the Relief Society. The Quorum of the Twelve provided the newspapers with a one-sentence announcement, stating that the grounds for excommunication was a violation of the law of chastity, which was the standard interpretation of new plural marriages performed since the 1904 Second Manifesto. (Plural marriages performed between the First Manifesto in 1890 and the Second Manifesto were tolerated by the church.) After the excommunication, J. Reuben Clark worried that Lyman might join the Mormon fundamentalist movement. Lyman later returned to the LDS Church through rebaptism on October 27, 1954, but he was not reinstated as an apostle. He died at Salt Lake City, Utah. Notes References 2005 Deseret Morning News Church Almanac (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Morning News, 2004) p. 65. Kimball, Edward L. & Andrew E. Kimball Jr., Spencer W. Kimball: Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1977) p. 208-210. Quinn, D. Michael, Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2002): 252-253. Quinn, D. Michael, Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth Century Americas: The Mormon Example (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996): 371-372. Quinn, D. Michael, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997): 183. Sillito, John R., "Enigmatic Apostle: The Excommunication of Richard R. Lyman." Paper presented at Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1991. External links "Richard R. Lyman", gapages.com Richard Roswell Lyman papers, MSS 1079 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Richard Roswell Lyman's diary at L. Tom Perry