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New Content on the Joseph Smith Papers Website
August 27, 2024
The Joseph Smith Papers is pleased to announce its latest web publication. This release features an introduction and documents for Joseph Smith’s land transactions in the Nauvoo, Illinois, area from 1839 to 1844. It also includes more than one hundred additional documents for two legal cases about the estate of Joseph Smith, fifty additional versions of documents from 1830 to 1835, and new and updated calendar of documents entries related to the Illinois land transactions and the additional versions of documents.
In the Financial Records series, this release includes records of hundreds of land transactions Joseph Smith was a party to in his effort to build the city of Nauvoo as a home for the Latter-day Saints. Many of these documents have already been included in the Documents series in chronological order. All of them, including more than a hundred new deeds, are now also included in the Financial Records series in alphabetical order by the names of the people or organizations that, in addition to Joseph Smith, were party to the land transactions. An introduction to the Illinois land transactions explains the context of these documents.
In the Legal Records series, this release adds multiple deeds related to United States v. Joseph Smith III et al. In 1851 and 1852, the United States Circuit Court for the District of Illinois ordered the sale of these properties to settle the federal government’s claim on Joseph Smith’s estate. Also included are several exhibits from this case that accompanied the defendants’ answers to the United States’ complaint. Exhibits from a related legal case, Kimball v. L. C. Bidamon et al., have been added as well.
The Joseph Smith Papers website seeks to be comprehensive in presenting all extant Joseph Smith documents, including other versions that contribute to understanding an original nonextant text or that were authorized by Joseph Smith. This release presents fifty other versions of revelations, letters, and other documents dating from 1830 to 1835. All known versions that meet the above criteria are listed in the calendar of documents. These additional versions can be accessed from links in the calendar of documents as well as from a dropdown menu for the featured version of each document. Future releases will include images and transcripts of more document versions.
New Content on the Joseph Smith Papers Website
June 4, 2024
The Joseph Smith Papers is pleased to announce its latest web publication. This release features the entirety of Documents, Volume 12: March–July 1843, including all annotation and introductions, as well as related documents and additional versions of documents from the time period. We have also updated the organization of the legal content and added additional documents for the legal case United States v. Jeremiah Smith. Glossary entries for merchants with connections to Joseph Smith have also been added, as have a couple hundred new biographical entries. New images for several documents that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently purchased from the Community of Christ are also now available on the website.
Documents, Volume 12 includes documents related to the many roles Joseph Smith filled during spring and summer of 1843: mayor of Nauvoo, justice of the peace, commander of the Nauvoo Legion, and leader of a rapidly growing church. In June 1843, agents from Missouri attempted once again to extradite him to stand trial for treason. During the months of March through July 1843, he attended city council meetings and signed ordinances that regulated the economy. In March 1843, as justice of the peace, he adjudicated a medical malpractice suit, Charles Dana v. William Brink, which drew public interest and resulted in the only judicial decision by Joseph Smith that was published in his lifetime. He delivered several discourses and instructions to church members both privately and publicly, including at the 6–9 April conference of the church where he emphasized the importance of building the Nauvoo temple and Nauvoo House. On 12 July 1843, he dictated his final major revelation, on eternal and plural marriage. During this time period, he also corresponded with several individuals concerning a variety of topics.
From March through August 1843, Joseph Smith directed Willard Richards and William W. Phelps to write a series of letters to the editor of the Boston Daily Bee, describing life in Nauvoo. Several drafts of these letters exist as well as the published versions in the Daily Bee, all of which are now included on this website. This release also includes new and updated entries in the calendar of documents for the Documents, Volume 12 time period.
In the Legal Records series, this release includes additional docket entries for the legal case United States v. Jeremiah Smith. Although Joseph Smith discharged the defendant, Jeremiah Smith, during habeas corpus proceedings in the Nauvoo, Illinois, municipal court in 1844, these docket entries show that the United States Criminal Court of the District of Columbia continued the case against Jeremiah Smith until 1859. We also modified the organization of the Legal Records series to align with the recently published e-book, Legal Records: Case Introductions.
In the Financial Records series, this release adds new entries to the financial glossary for New York merchants with whom the Kirtland-area Latter-day Saint mercantile firms did business in 1835 and 1836. Some of the debts to these merchants went unpaid, which resulted in renegotiations and litigation. Many of these Kirtland debts were included in Joseph Smith’s petition for bankruptcy in 1842. Also included in this release are several new glossary entries to help readers identify stores and artisans in Nauvoo.
New biographical entries for individuals who appear in financial and legal documents are also included with this release. These entries do not have biographical sketches of the individuals but do have links to the Book of the Law of the Lord and other documents they appear in. Future releases will include more of these biographical entries.
Finally, this release includes updated images and source notes for almost two dozen documents recently acquired from the Community of Christ. These documents include the manuscripts of Joseph Smith’s revision of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, as well as the Bible used for this project; John Whitmer’s history of the church; the “caractors” document with characters copied from the gold plates; and several letters Joseph Smith wrote to his wife Emma Smith from 1832 to 1844.
Honoring Kate Mertes, Award-Winning Indexer of The Joseph Smith Papers
June 4, 2024
Kate Mertes receiving the Award for Excellence in Indexing in 2015. Also pictured: Nathan Waite from the Church Historian’s Press and Lucie Haskins of the American Society for Indexing. (Photograph by Gwen Henson.)
by Nathan N. Waite, Associate Editorial Manager
Late last year, the indexer of The Joseph Smith Papers, Kate Mertes, passed away at age sixty-eight. Kate is one of the unsung heroes of the project, and I wanted to share a little about her contributions.
Kate received a PhD in medieval history from the University of Edinburgh and worked as a full-time book indexer for more than thirty years. She served twice as president of the American Society for Indexing (ASI) and received numerous indexing awards.
To understand Kate’s contribution to The Joseph Smith Papers, I have to start the story a few years before she got involved.
Back in 2008, we were preparing to publish our first volume, Journals, Volume 1, and we spent a lot of time researching how to index the print edition. We prepared an extensive style guide and sent the galleys for that first volume off to our contracted indexer, expecting a smooth final step before going to press.
Things did not work out that way. The indexer we were working with was more accustomed to general-interest books and returned a short index that did not meet our needs. Meanwhile, time was running out if we wanted to get the book on shelves before the end of the year.
So Journals, Volume 1 came out in November 2008 without an index. Instead, we decided to index the Journals series cumulatively and prepare interim indexes for individual volumes; readers could print the interim indexes out themselves or receive them by mail. Doing a separate index was an unconventional but functional solution—the Deseret News even published a quirky story about the episode.
This approach meant, however, that several project editors had to spend a sleep-deprived month learning how to index and then indexing a dense, five-hundred-page book—using Microsoft Word. The final index was fifty-eight pages.
Our team went on to create the indexes for five more volumes. It was labor-intensive work, and we eventually decided to try contracting again. We reached out to several experts in the field of indexing, and the name they recommended above all others was Kate Mertes.
We hired Kate to index Documents, Volume 3, and she did a fantastic job. Building off our style guide, she corrected some inelegancies and overindexing, and the result was the best index we’d ever produced. In fact, it won the ASI’s Award for Excellence in Indexing in 2015.
Kate compiled the rest of our indexes after that, a total of fifteen volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers. Every six months I’d email her, “Want to do the next one?” and she’d respond, “I am in!” Though she had no prior connection to the Latter-day Saint tradition, she grew fond of many of the people she encountered in the books. She even found one of her own ancestors mentioned in a volume. She started calling Joseph Smith “JS” like we do in our annotation.
Kate Mertes cared deeply about her craft: I have scores of emails in which we traded ideas and improvements. She was an advocate for new technology and helped us build a process for including hyperlinked indexes in our e-books. She was very intelligent but didn’t make a show of it—she was witty, kind, and down-to-earth.
In her acceptance speech for the 2015 ASI indexing award, Kate shared her approach to indexing volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers:
Trying to prevent oneself from getting lost in historical minutiae such as brickmaking, the regrettably common practice of spitting tobacco juice onto the floor and the subsequent difficulty of removing the stains, medicinal use of herbs, and the frequency of cholera is a matter of constantly reminding oneself, “Why is this document in this collection? What is the purpose of this text?” In this case the text is to elucidate the life of JS, his teachings, and the earliest development of a new and distinctive religious movement, and every entry in the index needs to serve that purpose.
We were looking forward to many more years of collaborating with Kate Mertes on future Church Historian’s Press projects, and we’re saddened by her passing. I’m grateful she was willing to take on a job as enormous as The Joseph Smith Papers, and I’m confident researchers will benefit from her work for decades to come.
Joseph Smith Papers Publishes Guide to Approximately 200 Legal Cases Involving Joseph Smith as Plaintiff, Defendant, Witness, or Judge
April 17, 2024
The Joseph Smith Papers Project has released Legal Records: Case Introductions, a historical study aid that contextualizes Joseph Smith’s interactions with the law as a plaintiff/complainant, defendant, witness, or judge in approximately two hundred cases between 1819 and 1844. Available as an e-book only, Legal Records: Case Introductions is a compilation of historical introductions previously published at josephsmithpapers.org.
The project also announces the completion of its online Legal Records series. This series represents decades of dedicated research by attorneys, archivists, and historians who have scoured courthouses, repositories, and private manuscript collections to illuminate the legal experiences of Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It features extant case files from 150 legal cases heard during his lifetime; it also summarizes 43 cases for which no papers have survived, as reconstructed from other sources. Finally, the Legal Records series features documents from the 1845 trial of Joseph Smith’s accused assassins, as well as the records of his estate and twelve cases brought against it. High-resolution images and transcriptions of all available documents from the legal cases involving Joseph Smith can now be found on the project website.
Legal Records: Case Introductions brings together in a single volume the historical introductions from the Legal Records series, along with explanatory essays on Joseph Smith’s criminal and civil proceedings, his role as a judge in Nauvoo, Illinois, and the Nauvoo Municipal Court’s use of habeas corpus.
This e-book will be particularly useful for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints studying the life of Joseph Smith, said David W. Grua, lead historian on the series. “These legal papers provide an illuminating window into various aspects of his financial endeavors in building Zion, his interactions with his antagonists, and his efforts to administer the law fairly as a judge. In addition, legal encounters shaped some of his most significant religious teachings and revelations.”
This volume will also benefit researchers interested in nineteenth-century legal and religious history in the United States. It offers glimpses into the treatment of women and racial minorities, as well as religious minorities, under the law during this period.
Legal Records: Case Introductions is available for purchase at Deseret Book and on Amazon.
A requisition from Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs, demanding the extradition of Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saints to Missouri, is one of the documents associated with Extradition of Joseph Smith et al. for Treason and Other Crimes. This was the first of three such attempts, all unsuccessful. Historical introductions to the cases are featured in Legal Records: Case Introductions, a new e-book from the Joseph Smith Papers Project. (Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.)
In his role as a justice of the peace in the Nauvoo, Illinois, mayor's court, Joseph Smith presided over a medical malpractice suit, Dana v. Brink. The case was so widely followed that more than forty Nauvoo citizens petitioned him to publish his decision in a local newspaper; it was the only decision he rendered that was published during his lifetime. (Courtesy of the Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City.)
New Content on the Joseph Smith Papers Website
March 5, 2024
The Joseph Smith Papers is pleased to announce its latest web publication. This release features introductions and documents related to two steamboats partly owned by Joseph Smith. It also includes a general introduction to the Legal Records series of the Joseph Smith Papers and an introduction and documents pertaining to a legal case about Joseph Smith’s estate. Finally, this release adds hundreds of new links to the project’s calendar of documents.
In the Financial Records series, this release includes records related to two steamboats—the Nauvoo and the Maid of Iowa—of which Joseph Smith was part owner during the time he lived in Nauvoo. The steamboat Nauvoo was purchased by a group of five men, including Joseph Smith, from the United States government in September 1840. The Maid of Iowa was not initially owned by Joseph Smith, but Captain Dan Jones asked Smith to buy out his partner, Levi Moffet, in 1843. Both steamboats created financial difficulties for Smith. More information on the steamboats can be found in the introductions to the steamboat Nauvoo and the Maid of Iowa.
In the Legal Records series, this release includes an introduction and documents for Ferris Administrator of the Estate of JS, the last of the proceedings concerning Joseph Smith’s estate. In 1848, the Hancock County Probate Court appointed John M. Ferris to replace Joseph W. Coolidge as administrator of the estate. As administrator, Ferris fielded claims from Smith’s creditors and was a defendant in several civil suits filed against the estate. The introduction covers these suits, including the United States government’s pursuit of payment from the estate in United States v. Joseph Smith III et al. The government sought to collect an unpaid judgment from United States v. Haws et al., an 1842 civil suit in which Joseph Smith was a defendant. In 1850, the government brought suit against at least eighty-four defendants who possessed real estate formerly belonging to Joseph Smith, including Ferris as administrator, Emma Smith and her husband Lewis C. Bidamon, and Joseph and Emma’s children.
This release also provides an introduction to the Legal Records series. This introduction gives an overview of Joseph Smith’s involvement in more than 150 legal cases as judge, plaintiff (or complainant), defendant, or witness. Introductions, document calendars, and documents for these cases can be accessed through the Legal Records tab or in previously published finding aids: Joseph Smith as a Judge, Joseph Smith and Civil Litigation, and Joseph Smith and the Criminal Justice System.
The calendar of documents has been updated to include links to documents that have recently been added to the Joseph Smith Papers website. Future releases will include more updates to the calendar of documents to provide users with a listing of all known Joseph Smith documents.