I am not LDS myself, but have been doing amateur genealogy research for a few years and have a few generations in the 1800s-early 1900s on one side of my family that practiced Mormon polygamy/multiple marriage. I have noticed that my family tree is entirely made up of first wives, no matter how many wives the husband actually had (usually 2-5, although 3 is most common). I can speculate that there's some social power dynamics going on, since the first wives usually got the legal acknowledgement on censuses, shared gravestones, etc, but has this power dynamic ever been studied or quantified? That is, is there evidence the son of a first wife would be perceived as a better marriage prospect than the son of a third wife? Or am I simply seeing a pattern from the relatively small sample size of my family that's just not there on a larger scale?

As a vaguely related question, several of the women, especially second wives and later, had multiple husbands as well, although sequentially, not simultaneously. Their divorces or separations don't seem to be well-recorded, especially since their marriages were usually recorded outside the legal structure. What were the rights of women to divorce in early Mormon communities?