Joseph Smith Papers
The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents
Everything Joseph Smith wrote, dictated, signed or had recorded on his behalf, transcribed from the manuscripts — and, held deliberately apart from it, the modern scholarship that explains it.
What it is
The Documents series of the Joseph Smith Papers gathers the papers created by or under the direction of Joseph Smith between 1827 and 1844: letters sent and received, revelations as first written down, minutes of councils and conferences, reports of discourses, deeds, licences and business records. It is published by the Church Historian's Press and edited to documentary-editing standards — transcribed from the manuscripts, with the cancellations and insertions preserved.
This is the closest thing that exists to a primary record of the founding era. It is also very unlike a scripture text, and that is the point: a revelation appears here as it was first recorded, not as it was later edited for canonisation, and a council meeting appears as somebody's rough minutes rather than as history.
The apparatus is held separately, on purpose
The Joseph Smith Papers volumes carry a great deal of modern editorial material — introductions, source notes, historical annotation, biographical directories. That material is excellent and it is not Joseph Smith. In this library it is a separate edition of the work, classed as historical and secondary, so an answer can tell you whether a statement comes from an 1839 letter or from a 2010 footnote explaining it.
Of the 5,000 indexed items, 4,144 are the papers themselves and 856 are the editorial apparatus.
What is in it
660 named people appear across the series — the correspondents, scribes, clerks and council members whose names are on the documents.
| Subject | Items |
|---|---|
| Nauvoo | 2,629 |
| Illinois | 1,899 |
| Hancock County | 1,062 |
| Kirtland | 1,037 |
| Ohio | 927 |
| Sidney Rigdon | 905 |
| Frederick G. Williams | 860 |
| Missionary work | 843 |
| Hyrum Smith | 782 |
| Priesthood | 750 |
| Real estate | 633 |
| Ordination | 633 |
| Preaching | 585 |
| Debt | 548 |
Subject tags are model-generated. Real estate and debt rank high because a great deal of the surviving record is exactly that — land, notes and obligations. The founding of a church generated a lot of paperwork about property.
Why this is the hardest thing in the library to search
A document from 1834 does not use the words a reader in 2026 would use, does not always name its subject, and may be a licence, a receipt or a fragment. Spelling is unstandardised and often phonetic. Names are abbreviated. The most historically significant item in a given month may be four lines long.
That is precisely why it belongs in an indexed corpus rather than a browsable archive. A question asked in modern words has to be able to reach a document that never uses them.
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5,000 documents indexed, with the papers and the modern annotation kept apart.
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