Method & sources

Gaps recorded across the database

• Andrew F. Ehat's thesis, 'Joseph Smith's Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question,' and Ronald K. Esplin's 'All the Measures of Joseph' — both cited repeatedly by the faithful-scholarly side; neither is held.
• Any independent quantitative study of abuse prevalence or reporting outcomes among Latter-day Saints. The Journal of Mormon History run held here ends in 2014, before the period this topic mostly covers.
• B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (1992), and his documentary companion Doing the Works of Abraham — the standard study of post-Manifesto polygamy, cited constantly here and held nowhere; only a BYU Studies review notice and citation records are in the corpus.
• Bagley's Blood of the Prophets (2002), Denton's American Massacre (2003), Bigler and Bagley's Innocent Blood (2008), Turley and Brown's Vengeance Is Mine (2023), and Turley/Johnson/Carruth's Collected Legal Papers (2017) are all absent. FAIR's rebuttal-compilation pages reproduce Bagley and Denton at length, but a passage there may be the critic's words under a faithful-apologetic stance tag.
• Boyd K. Packer's 1981 CES address and his 18 May 1993 All-Church Coordinating Council talk are not held as texts, only as quotations on apologetic and critical sites; the BYU Studies reprint of the former is absent from the corpus's BYU Studies holdings.
• Charles M. Larson, By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus (1992) — cited constantly across the corpus and answered chapter-by-chapter on FAIR's rebuttal pages, but the book itself is NOT held. What comes back under that title is either FAIR's rebuttal compilation reproducing Larson's argument in order to answer it, or a BYU Studies article of similar name.
• Contemporary newspaper coverage: the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News and Church News are not held. Everything quoted from them here reaches the corpus through Sunstone, Dialogue, FAIR or the Tanners, each of which had a stake in the reporting.
• D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, cited constantly across the corpus on the treasure-seeking context and not held; Simon Southerton's Losing a Lost Tribe, present only as the book FAIR reproduces in order to answer it.
• D. Michael Quinn, 'The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844,' BYU Studies 16 (Winter 1976): 187–233 — the standard account and the source of the 'eight methods' framing. It is cited across the corpus in the Journal of Mormon History and Dialogue, but the article text itself was not retrievable here.
• Document Containing the Correspondence, Orders, &c., in Relation to the Disturbances with the Mormons (Fayette, Mo., 1841) — the Missouri legislature's printed compilation of the Richmond testimony and militia correspondence, and the ur-text for Avard's testimony, Marsh's affidavit and the extermination order. Not held; reached only through reproductions.
• Ensign, Liahona and New Era are effectively absent from this corpus — three articles in total. That is severe for this topic, because the pamphlets and magazine pieces that actually reached members (Packer's 'To Young Men Only,' Oaks's 1995 'Same-Gender Attraction,' 'God Loveth His Children,' 'Understanding and Helping Those Who Have Homosexual Problems') reach us only as quotations inside FAIR, Dialogue and Interpreter.
• Greg Prince and Wm. Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism — not held. It carries the McKay diaries on race that everything else in the corpus quotes at second hand.
• Greg Prince's Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History and Arrington's own Adventures of a Church Historian are not held; nor is Gary Bergera's edition of Arrington's diaries, quoted here only through Quinn's footnotes.
• Gregory Prince's Gay Rights and the Mormon Church is not held, only reviewed. Petrey's Tabernacles of Clay is not held either — it is present entirely through two long rebuttals and several reviews, which means the corpus can argue with the book more easily than it can quote it.
• Hugh Nibley's own Book of Abraham corpus is absent as text: 'The Meaning of the Kirtland Egyptian Papers' (BYU Studies 11:4, 1971), The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri (1975), Abraham in Egypt, and the Improvement Era 'A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price' series. The corpus returns the BYU Studies issue table of contents and hundreds of citations, not the articles.
• Joseph Smith Papers scope excludes Kinderhook material entirely, so the Kinderhook plates — the natural control case for Joseph Smith as translator — cannot be worked from primary documents here; Clayton's journal entry is reachable only as quoted by the Tanners and by FAIR.
• Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950) and John Doyle Lee (1961) are NOT held. Brooks is quoted extensively inside Tanner's books and FAIR's answer pages, which means her most-quoted sentences reach this file through two adversarial intermediaries.
• Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds., The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History, and Bringhurst's Saints, Slaves, and Blacks — not held; only reviews and citations.
• Milton V. Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision: Confirming Evidences and Contemporary Accounts, and Steven C. Harper, First Vision: Memory and Mormon Origins (Oxford, 2019) — the two most substantial book-length faithful treatments. Neither is held; Harper's BYU Studies articles are the closest substitute.
• Mormon Stories and other podcast transcripts are not searchable here, and no episode numbers are cited. Much of the primary testimony from LGBTQ Latter-day Saints in the last fifteen years lives in interviews this corpus cannot reach.
• No Church handbook is held. The November 2015 language, the April 2019 revision and the 2020 General Handbook transgender section are all reconstructed from quotation — accurately and consistently across camps, but at one remove. The corpus also surfaced no 2024 handbook revision on transgender members; the transgender policy material here dates to February 2020 and its 2023 scholarly analysis.
• Orson Hyde, Ein Ruf aus der Wüste (1842), his German revision of Pratt's pamphlet, and the manuscript journals of Levi Richards (1843) and Alexander Neibaur (1844). None held; all three secondhand accounts survive here only as other people's quotations of them.
• Orson Pratt, An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions (Edinburgh, 1840) — the first published account of the vision anywhere. Not held; reachable only through quotation and citation records.
• Proceedings before the Committee on Privileges and Elections in the Matter of the Protests against the Right of Hon. Reed Smoot (4 vols.) — the hearing transcripts themselves; the corpus holds Smoot's diaries but not the testimony.
• Richard S. Van Wagoner's Mormon Polygamy: A History and D. Michael Quinn's Origins of Power are not held, so two of the standard critical tallies of wives are reachable only through others' quotation of them. Van Wagoner's 1985 Dialogue article on polyandry is held.
• Ronald W. Walker, 'Six Days in August: Brigham Young and the Succession Crisis of 1844' (BYU Religious Studies Center, 2011) — the fullest believing narrative of the August week; cited only.
• Royal Skousen's critical text volumes (the typographical facsimiles of the original and printer's manuscripts) and the Joseph Smith Papers Revelations and Translations volumes, which are the standard apparatus for any claim about textual change.
• Sidney Rigdon's Oration Delivered by Mr. S. Rigdon on the 4th of July, 1838 — the pamphlet itself is not held as a work, only quoted.
• State statutory material beyond a single Arizona provision. A topic that turns on fifty-state variation in clergy-penitent privilege is served here by one 2010 Arizona statute and secondhand summaries.
• Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (1987), and Alexander L. Baugh, A Call to Arms (2000) — the two book-length modern accounts around which the entire historiographical dispute turns; neither is held, though the argument between them is visible in JMH, Sunstone and BYU Studies.
• Strangite, Cutlerite and Bickertonite primary papers — the Voree Herald, the Gospel Herald, the Ensign of Liberty (McLellin's later Kirtland paper, distinct from the 1844–45 Ensign held here). Rigdon's and McLellin's 1844–45 papers are held; the rest of the dissident press is not.
• The 1826 Bainbridge legal records in their original form — the Joseph Smith Papers' scope excludes them, and the corpus reaches them only through Vogel's transcriptions and through counter-cult reproductions.
• The Associated Press originals. Rezendes's 2022 investigation and its follow-ups reach the corpus only as reproduced text inside archive citation records.
• The Church's General Handbook itself, in any edition. The corpus reaches handbook language only through B. H. Roberts Foundation archive records and through pages that quote it; the current abuse.ChurchofJesusChrist.org material is not held as text.
• The Deseret News is not held. Several 1857–2007 items quoted here reach the corpus only as B. H. Roberts Foundation records reproducing Deseret News text; Carleton's 1859 Report and the full Lee trial transcripts are likewise cited everywhere and held nowhere.
• The Deseret News, The Seer, the Woman's Exponent and the Millennial Star after 1859 — the contemporary Mormon press for this whole period, which means the 1852 Deseret News extra, Pratt's Washington periodical and the women's own newspaper are all reachable only through quotation.
• The Deseret News, and the Church magazines (Improvement Era, Ensign) — effectively absent. Much of the 1947–1978 story ran there first, and the corpus reaches it only through the Tanners' reproductions and later citations.
• The Deseret News, which is not held. Much of the Church-side reporting on finances — Tad Walch's work in particular — reaches this corpus only through single-paragraph B. H. Roberts Foundation records that reproduce fragments.
• The Ensign, Liahona and the Church Handbook of Instructions. The Church magazines are effectively absent (three articles total), and the Handbook — which is where tithing settlement and temple recommend requirements are actually specified — is not held, so those requirements are reachable only through conference talks and through what critics and apologists quote.
• The Gospel Topics essay "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" — the Church's own framing of this episode — is NOT held as text. Every quotation of it here passes through a reproduction, most of them apologetic. The official-lds commentary on this topic rests on that footing until the essay is added to the corpus.
• The Gospel Topics essay 'Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints' as its own work; its text is reached only through FAIR's and MormonThink's reproductions.
• The Improvement Era and Ensign are effectively absent (three articles total), so the Church's own 1968 publication of the papyri photographs, Jay M. Todd's reporting, and the decades of Nibley's serialized defense can only be reached second-hand through critics and apologists who quote them.
• The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal, which carries most of the serious scholarship on Strang, Cutler, William Smith and the Reorganization, is not held at all. Vickie Cleverley Speek's God Has Made Us a Kingdom (on Strang) and the Fletchers' biography of Cutler are likewise cited but absent.
• The Reed Peck manuscript and John D. Lee's Mormonism Unveiled as standalone texts; both are quoted only through Tanner and other reproductions.
• The Saints' Herald for 1 October 1879, which carries Emma Smith's 'Last Testimony' — quoted everywhere in the corpus, held nowhere in it.
• The Widow's Mite Report's actual analyses. The corpus holds only seven works and 46 pages — the site's index and framing. The annual reports, the real-estate and temple studies, the Ensign Peak workbook and the 151 external filings it points to (SEC forms, Church welfare reports, UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Netherlands ANBI disclosures) are all external PDFs the corpus does not hold.
• The William Clayton Nauvoo journals, the single most important contemporaneous source for 1842–44, are held only as UNVERIFIED TRANSCRIPTS: searchable, but explicitly not citable, with verification by the Church History Library expected in 2027. Every Clayton quotation here therefore comes through a published secondary work that reproduces it.
• The court records themselves. The Cochise County summary-judgment ruling, the Arizona Supreme Court opinion, and the federal insurance decisions are available here only through archive records and FLOODLIT's reporting on documents it purchased.
• The disciplined scholars' own books: Maxine Hanks, ed., Women and Authority (Signature, 1992) and Paul Toscano, The Sanctity of Dissent (Signature, 1994) are not held — only quotations of them. Brent Metcalfe's New Approaches to the Book of Mormon is held.
• The full nine-page SEC order, David Nielsen's IRS complaint and Senate memorandum, and the Ninth Circuit's en banc opinion. All are described and partly reproduced in indexing records; none is held as a document, so paragraph-level citation to them cannot be verified here.
• The manuscript originals of the load-bearing documents — the Cowdery letterbook, the Phelps 1861 letter, the Joseph F. Smith affidavit books, the Temple Lot depositions — are not held. All of them are reachable only as reproductions inside works with a stance, which means every quotation should be checked against the repository before it is relied on.
• The technical Egyptological literature: Ritner's The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition, Michael D. Rhodes's The Hor Book of Breathings, Marc Coenen's dating studies, and John Gee's A Guide to the Joseph Smith Papyri and An Introduction to the Book of Abraham. All are cited heavily; none are held.
• Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1997) is NOT held by this corpus, though it is cited on nearly every page of every camp's treatment. Its absence matters more here than on any other topic, because it is the standard biographical treatment of the women themselves. Compton's Dialogue and Journal of Mormon History articles from 1996 and 1999 ARE held and cover much of the same ground in summary.
• W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Racial Construction of Mormonism (Oxford, 2015) — cited constantly across the corpus, held nowhere. It is the standard account of how Latter-day Saints came to be classified racially and how that shaped the ban.
• Walker, Turley and Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008) is NOT held. The corpus has four substantial reviews and the authors' own document issue of BYU Studies, but not the book — so its argument is reported here at one remove.
• Wesley P. Walters, New Light on Mormon Origins from the Palmyra (N.Y.) Revival (1967) and Marquardt & Walters, Inventing Mormonism (1994) — the primary critical case on the revival dating, present only through reproductions in Utah Lighthouse Ministry and LDS Discussions material and through replies to it.
• Wilford Woodruff's journals (Kenney edition) and the Abraham H. Cannon, George Q. Cannon and Anthon H. Lund diaries — the private record on which nearly every claim in this topic depends, present only as quotations inside other works.