120 people across 13 topics, by surname. 76 have a free portrait; the rest show initials until one is found. Someone who appears in several topics is listed once here. Every name links to that person's own page — their note from each topic, and every dated event they were part of, in one sequence.
Baptized in 1832, ordained an elder on 3 March 1836 and a Seventy that December, Abel served three missions and worked on the Salt Lake Temple. He was repeatedly refused the endowment, and in 1879 defended his own ordination before John Taylor's council, saying the Prophet Joseph had told him he was entitled to the priesthood. In 1908 Joseph F. Smith declared the ordination had been void all along.
A household helper in the Smith home in Kirtland, she is named by Utah-era Latter-day Saints as Joseph Smith's first plural wife, probably in 1835 or early 1836. Emma expelled her from the house; Oliver Cowdery called the relationship a dirty, nasty, filthy affair. Fanny married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon, on 16 November 1836 and never spoke publicly about Joseph Smith.
Allen's 1966 Dialogue article established, from inside the faith, that the story of the vision was not in general circulation in the 1830s — not in the Book of Commandments, not in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, not in early missionary literature. It remains the single most-cited finding on the topic, quoted approvingly by apologists and critics alike.
A former Ensign editor and editor of the Journal of Mormon History, Anderson compiled the dated, named record of ecclesiastical pressure on Latter-day Saint intellectuals that she read at the 1992 Sunstone symposium and published in Dialogue in Spring 1993. That article, and the Mormon Alliance she co-founded to document what she called ecclesiastical and spiritual abuse, were the stated grounds of her stake president's concern. She was excommunicated on 23 September 1993, appealed at length, was denied, and has attended her ward continuously ever since.
In February 1828 Martin Harris showed him a sheet of copied characters. Joseph Smith's history says Anthon pronounced the translation correct and then tore up his own certificate; Anthon's 1834 and 1841 letters say he told Harris the whole thing was a fraud and denied ever calling the characters Egyptian. Both accounts are self-interested, and neither can be checked against the sheet Harris actually carried, which does not survive.
The first professionally trained historian to hold the office, Arrington opened the Church archives, hired a staff and launched a sixteen-volume history. His decade was later nicknamed 'Camelot.' The projects were curtailed, his title was changed in 1978, his division was moved to Brigham Young University, and he was released in January 1982 without public announcement. Everything that followed in this story runs through the rise and collapse of his History Division.
Atiya, not a Latter-day Saint, was searching Coptic files at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966 when he recognized a damaged vignette as the original of Facsimile 1, glued to a backing sheet with the missing figures drawn in. Ten other fragments and an 1856 bill of sale signed by Emma Bidamon, Lewis Bidamon and Joseph Smith III were with it. He arranged the contact that led to the Museum's 1967 transfer of the fragments to the Church.
Austin is the Church's lead outside controversy-and-crisis counsel and the most detailed public defender of the help line. At the 2025 FAIR conference in Lehi he described it as serving 31,000 bishops and branch presidents, argued that "far more abuse gets reported when the bishop calls the helpline than if we didn't have one," and said that clergy privilege, which he counted as law in 37 states, increases rather than suppresses disclosure. He also stated publicly that he is himself a survivor of child sexual abuse.
Avard organized and drilled the Danite band at Far West in June 1838 and administered its oath. Captured during the siege of Far West, he became the prosecution's chief witness at the Richmond court of inquiry, testifying that everything he had done was on orders from the First Presidency. He was excommunicated; both faithful and dissenting Latter-day Saints described him as untrustworthy.
Baer, who had tutored Hugh Nibley in reading Egyptian, published the first extensive translation of the recovered text in Dialogue in autumn 1968 under the title 'The Breathing Permit of Hôr: A Translation of the Apparent Source of the Book of Abraham.' He travelled to Provo and examined the papyri personally, called his own study preliminary, and stated flatly that Joseph Smith thought this papyrus contained the Book of Abraham.
Baker led the Arkansas contingent that gave the company the other half of its name. His body was one of the few later recognizable at the site: his granddaughter Rebecca Dunlap identified him weeks afterward by his long beard, lying unburied. His widow Mary Baker took charge of three orphaned grandchildren when they were returned to Arkansas in 1859.
Sealed to Joseph Smith on 5 April 1841 by her brother-in-law Joseph Bates Noble, in a grove near the Mississippi, wearing a man's coat and hat. Noble swore an affidavit to the ceremony in 1869 and testified about it again in the 1892 Temple Lot hearings. Hers is the earliest Nauvoo plural marriage that can be dated from a sworn statement.
Mayor of Nauvoo and assistant to the First Presidency until his fall in May 1842 amid charges of sexual misconduct, after which he published a series of exposés naming women he said Joseph Smith had approached, and printed the letter to Nancy Rigdon now called the Happiness Letter. His accuracy on names and dates is often good and his framing is hostile, which is why every camp uses him selectively.
Boggs had lived in Independence and had supported the 1833 expulsion from Jackson County. On 27 October 1838, acting on exaggerated reports of the Crooked River fight and on Thomas Marsh's affidavit, he ordered that the Mormons "be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State." The order was not rescinded until 1976.
Brodie's 1945 biography argued that the vision passed unnoticed in Palmyra and may have been 'an evolutionary fantasy beginning in a half-remembered dream stimulated by the early revival excitement,' or else invention. Her hypothesis set the terms of the twentieth-century argument; both defenders and critics have been answering it ever since.
Brooks, herself descended from a southern Utah participant, published The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950 against the wishes of local church leadership and made it impossible to keep blaming the Paiutes. Her verdict — that Brigham Young and George A. Smith did not order the massacre but preached the sermons and built the conditions that made it possible, and that Young was an accessory after the fact — is still the axis around which the argument turns. Turley and Brown dedicated their 2023 volume to her.
Brown told the New York Times in June 1963 that the Church was in the midst of a survey looking toward the possibility of admitting Black members to the priesthood, and read the Church's civil rights statement at October conference that year after meeting the Salt Lake NAACP. He pressed McKay repeatedly to lift the restriction and was overruled; he was dropped from the First Presidency in 1970.
Cadigan represented three of the Adams children in the Cochise County suit against the Church and two bishops, filed in November 2020. She pressed for release of the Church's disciplinary records and won an order from Judge Laura Cardinal requiring them; she is the source of the public characterization of those records as the Church's "secret records." The case ended against her clients at summary judgment and, ultimately, in the Arizona Supreme Court.
Cameron, later head of the acting program at the University of Iowa, volunteered for the BYU electric aversion therapy study in 1976 and gave the fullest first-person account of it in 2011. He described setting his own shock level and choosing the highest one: 'I was always turning it up to get the most pain because I was desperate.' Of the outcome he said it 'didn't change anything except increase my self-loathing.'
Leader of the movement Sidney Rigdon left for Mormonism. His 1831 essay, reprinted as the pamphlet Delusions in 1832, was the first sustained textual analysis of the Book of Mormon, arguing from the inside of the book rather than from gossip about its author. He charged that it answered 'every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years' — the founding statement of the environmental-authorship case.
Cannon edited the Manifesto into its final, shortened, first-person form and defended it publicly as inspired. He also signed recommends for plural marriages after 1890, told the New York Herald in 1899 that such marriages might be performed in Canada and Mexico, and testified in court that he knew of none. He is the pivot on which the question of institutional good faith turns.
A trained physician and fourth wife of Salt Lake Stake president Angus M. Cannon, she spent years in exile in England and Michigan to keep out of federal reach. In 1896 she ran for the Utah Senate as a Democrat against a Republican slate that included her own husband, beat him, and became the first woman state senator in the United States. Her letters record both the exile and the marriage's collapse.
As Presiding Bishop, Caussé oversees the Church's financial, real estate and investment operations, and Ensign Peak is supervised by the Presiding Bishopric. He published a 2018 article and Q&A on Church finances defending reserves by analogy to the parable of the talents, and gave a rare interview in February 2020 in which the Presiding Bishopric said the Church's combined humanitarian and welfare aid was approaching $1 billion a year.
Chandler arrived in Kirtland on 3 July 1835 with four mummies, two or more papyrus rolls and loose fragments, claiming to have inherited them from his uncle Antonio Lebolo. He had already exhibited and sold portions of the collection in eastern cities. On 6 July he gave Smith a written certificate that Smith's readings of the characters corresponded with what learned men had told him — a testimonial from a man with strong reason to close a sale and, as even faithful writers concede, no ability to check the claim.
Christofferson helped create the 2012 mormonsandgays.org site and, at the January 2015 press conference, said the Church would not apologize for its past rhetoric: 'The doctrines, values and beliefs all related to this haven't changed and won't, but I think we can express things better.' On 6 November 2015 he gave the scripted Newsroom interview defending the handbook change as protecting children from conflicts that 'can injure development in very tender years.' His brother Tom is gay and publicly described the policy as 'dreary.'
Corrill was an appointed church historian who broke with the leadership over the Danites and the October raids, negotiated the surrender of Far West, testified at Richmond, and in 1839 published a Brief History that remains one of the closest contemporary accounts of the Danite covenant. He later presented Latter-day Saint redress petitions to the Missouri legislature.
Cowdery copied characters from the rolls, inscribed Egyptian Alphabet–B, and worked with Smith and Phelps on the alphabet on 1 October 1835 when, the journal says, 'the system of astronomy was unfolded.' His 22 December 1835 letter to William Frye, printed in the Messenger and Advocate as 'Egyptian Mummies—Ancient Records,' is the fullest contemporary public account and denies the rumor that the church claimed to own Abraham's body.
As the senior militia officer in the Iron Military District, Dame first refused Haight's request to move against the company, writing that 'words are but wind.' After a private conversation with Haight on 9 September he reversed his council's decision and authorized an attack. He was later indicted but never brought to trial, and the record of what he authorized and when remains one of the sharpest points of dispute.
Dehlin founded the Mormon Stories podcast in 2005, interviewing believing, doubting and former Latter-day Saints, and later publicly supported Ordain Women and same-sex marriage. He was excommunicated in February 2015. Commentators in Dialogue group his case with Denver Snuffer's (2013) and Kate Kelly's (2014) on the ground that all three founded organizations the Church regarded as rival institutions, rather than merely publishing criticism. He is the owner of the database this synthesis is written for.
Doniphan had been the Saints' lawyer since the Jackson County expulsion and helped secure the creation of Caldwell County. As a militia general he refused to carry out Samuel Lucas's order to shoot Joseph Smith and the other prisoners, calling the court-martial illegal, and he treated the extermination clause of Boggs's order as without legal force.
Six years old at the massacre, Rebecca Dunlap lost both parents and older siblings and begged not to be separated from her sisters Louisa and the infant Sarah; Jacob Hamblin took the three of them into his house. She returned to the site weeks later and found the dead still unburied and scavenged. Interviewed in 1897, she flatly denied the claim that the children had been kindly treated, saying they were half fed, half clothed and harshly used.
Fancher had crossed to California before and was co-leader of the 1857 company that took his name. He knew the southern route from a time when its grazing was open and its settlements few. He was killed with his wife on 11 September; two of his children, Christopher Carson Fancher and Triphenia, were among the seventeen spared.
Ford insisted that Joseph Smith stand trial in Carthage rather than under Nauvoo's own courts, and pledged the state's protection. On the morning of 27 June 1844 he discharged the Warsaw militia, left two companies of the hostile Carthage Greys guarding the jail, and rode to Nauvoo. The discharged Warsaw company returned that afternoon and stormed the jail.
Forney was ordered in 1858 to recover the surviving children and reported in 1859 that sixteen had been collected the previous July and a seventeenth the following April. He established that none of them had ever lived among the Indians — they had been carried from the field to Jacob Hamblin's house the same evening and parcelled out among Mormon families. He began his inquiry expecting to exonerate the whites and concluded instead that whites had directed the affair.
Gee argues from eyewitness descriptions and scroll geometry that a long roll of Hor once existed, later revising his estimate to roughly 314 centimetres, and that the surviving fragments are not the source. He reviewed the 2018 Joseph Smith Papers volume on the Book of Abraham under the title 'The Joseph Smith Papers Project Stumbles,' opening a public quarrel with the volume's own editors — one of the clearest cases of faithful scholars disagreeing with each other in print.
Set nearly all the type and did most of the press work on the first edition, and supplied the punctuation the manuscript lacked. His 1887 statement and 1892 memorandum are the most detailed technical account of how the book was printed. He is also the source for the exchange in which Martin Harris, asked whether he saw the plates with his naked eyes, answered that he saw them with a spiritual eye.
A convert with a doctorate in ancient studies, Gileadi wrote The Last Days: Types and Shadows from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, published by the Church-owned Deseret Book. He is the theological conservative of the group and the one who never discussed his case publicly. Sunstone reported he was told he was excommunicated for teaching false doctrine, for being predatory in teaching his theology, and for believing dead prophets over living ones. He was rebaptized in February 1996.
Publisher of the Wayne Sentinel; he refused the job at first, and agreed only after learning a Rochester printer would take it and after Martin Harris put up his farm as security. He printed 5,000 copies for $3,000 between August 1829 and March 1830 and advertised the book for sale in his own newspaper on 26 March 1830.
A KSL journalist who joined the Church in 1964, Gray was flown to Wyoming on thirty minutes' notice in 1970 to face activists protesting BYU. He was first counselor in the Genesis Group from its founding, later co-wrote a trilogy of novels and the documentary Nobody Knows with Margaret Blair Young, and has spent decades recovering the record of Black Latter-day Saints.
Greco published "Confronting Men's Violence Against Women and Girls in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in Dialogue 58:3 (Fall 2025), a peer-reviewed article written openly from her position as a survivor and advocate. She argues that clergy-penitent law "has the unintended consequence of enabling harm in cases of child sex abuse," that the help line's client is the institution rather than the victim, and that the absence of Church-collected data is itself a structural finding.
Excommunicated in 1986 and legally married to his husband since 2008, Gustav-Wrathall has attended his Minneapolis ward for years as a believing but excommunicated Latter-day Saint. He led Affirmation through the November 2015 policy and reported that a membership survey found the share of Affirmation members active in the Church fell from over half before the policy to roughly twenty to twenty-five percent after it.
Haight held ecclesiastical, civil and military authority in Cedar City at once. He asked William Dame's permission to call out the militia against the emigrants and was refused; he then arranged with Lee to have Paiutes attack them, and after the siege went to Parowan to press Dame for authorization to kill the survivors. Walker, Turley and Leonard identify him as the primary architect. He was excommunicated in 1870, rebaptized in 1874, and lived much of the rest of his life as a fugitive.
Hanks edited Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (Signature, 1992), which gathered feminist writing on Latter-day Saint women's relationship to priesthood. She has said that five of her contributors and she herself faced Church discipline, and that four of them were among the September Six. Excommunicated on 19 September 1993, she later worked as a chaplain and a scholar of Gnosticism and was rebaptized in February 2012 without recanting her work.
Harper has written the fullest history of how the vision was remembered, and argues that its status as the all-or-nothing test of Mormon truth claims is itself a historical development — the product of canonization in 1880 and of choices made since, not of the 1820s or 1830s.
Wrote the lost 116 pages, carried the character transcript to Charles Anthon in New York, and mortgaged 151 acres of his Palmyra farm to Grandin to secure the $3,000 printing bill. He signed the Testimony of Three Witnesses and never publicly withdrew it, but he is also the witness who spoke of seeing the plates with a 'spiritual eye' and an 'eye of faith,' which is the single most quoted line on either side of the argument.
Haslam carried Haight's dispatch from Cedar City to Salt Lake City and Brigham Young's reply back again. He testified at Lee's second trial that he left Cedar City on 7 September between five and six in the evening, reached Salt Lake City Thursday at eleven in the morning, started back at three, and reached Cedar City about eleven on Sunday morning — two days after the massacre. The timing of his ride is the single most argued-over fact in the case.
Hinckley read the family proclamation publicly for the first time at the general Relief Society meeting on 23 September 1995. He had already taught in 1987 that 'marriage should not be viewed as a therapeutic step to solve problems such as homosexual inclinations or practices,' and in 1998 said the Church loved 'those who consider themselves so-called gays and lesbians' as sons and daughters of God but could not 'stand idle' if they lived in a same-sex marriage. He defended the Church's Proposition 22 campaign from the pulpit in October 1999.
Published Mormonism Unvailed in 1834, built on affidavits gathered by the excommunicated Doctor Philastus Hurlbut. The book set the terms of anti-Mormon argument for a century: the Smiths as money-diggers, and the Book of Mormon as a reworking of Solomon Spalding's unpublished romance passed through Sidney Rigdon. It also printed Anthon's letter denying Harris's version of their meeting.
Brother of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr., he resigned his membership in 2020 and sued the Corporation of the President in March 2021 for the return of more than $5 million in tithing, alleging the Church defrauded members about how tithing was spent on City Creek Center and the Beneficial Life bailout. His case was dismissed, partly revived by a 2-1 panel of the Ninth Circuit in August 2023, then dismissed again by an eleven-judge en banc panel.
Eleven years old when his father was killed, he refused every approach for fifteen years, then in 1860 accepted the presidency of the 'New Organization' that Jason Briggs and Zenas Gurley had built on the principle of lineal succession. He led the Reorganized Church for fifty-four years, rejecting plural marriage and denying that his father had practised it.
Lopez wrote the unanimous opinion of 30 July 2025 that ended the Adams children's suit. The holding was narrow in subject and broad in effect: whether a statement is a "confession," and whether keeping it confidential is "reasonable and necessary within the concepts of the religion," are questions of religious doctrine that the First Amendment bars courts from reviewing. In his words, "We may not substitute our interpretation of Church doctrine for the Church's reading of its own doctrine."
Married to Henry Bailey Jacobs in March 1841 and pregnant by him, she was sealed to Joseph Smith on 27 October 1841 by her brother Dimick Huntington. She continued to live with Jacobs, later married Brigham Young for time, and became the third general president of the Relief Society. Her own words about the sealing are the most quoted first-person witness on either side.
She walked most of the way from Connecticut to Nauvoo, lived in Joseph and Emma Smith's household, crossed the plains in 1847, and spent decades petitioning John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith for the endowment and a sealing. Every request was refused. In 1894 leaders devised a ceremony attaching her to Joseph Smith's family as a servitor, with a proxy standing in for her; she said it did not satisfy her and asked again.
Smith examined Chandler's papyri in July 1835, announced that one roll contained the writings of Abraham and another the writings of Joseph of Egypt, and urged the purchase. His history records that he spent the rest of July 'translating an alphabet to the Book of Abraham, and arrangeing a grammar of the Egyptian language as practiced by the ancients.' He published the text and his own explanations of the three facsimiles in 1842 and supervised the engraver, Reuben Hedlock, as the plates were cut.
With Darius Gray and Eugene Orr, Bridgeforth asked the Twelve in 1971 for a branch where Black members could gather. What they got instead was the Genesis Group, organized 19 October 1971 under Liberty Stake, with Bridgeforth as president — a leader who could not hold the priesthood he was asked to preside without. He was ordained in June 1978 and later made a high priest.
A believing Latter-day Saint physician, Bush spent a decade compiling a four-hundred-page anthology of First Presidency and Quorum minutes, sermons and correspondence on race, then distilled it into a fifty-seven-page article with 219 footnotes for Dialogue in 1973. It showed the restriction had no documented revelatory origin. Publishing it was thought to risk his membership and the journal's survival.
Clark read the annual financial report to general conference for seven consecutive years and made the disclosures of the 1940s the most detailed the Church ever gave — several printed pages, itemized by category. He kept Depression-era spending below a fraction of annual tithing revenue and funneled Church money into low-risk bank accounts rather than speculation. His removal from the reading of the report in April 1952 begins the retreat that ends in 1959.
Kelly, a human-rights lawyer, founded Ordain Women in 2013 and organized women seeking admission to the priesthood session of general conference. She was excommunicated in June 2014; the letter from her bishop cited conduct contrary to the laws and order of the Church and an aggressive effort to persuade other members to her point of view. Her case is the clearest twenty-first-century successor to 1993, and the first fought largely online.
From the 1950s onward Kimball was the general authority to whom members with what the Church then called 'homosexual problems' were referred. His 1964 leader address 'A Counselling Problem in the Church' and his 1965 BYU talk 'Love versus Lust' framed the response, and his 1969 book The Miracle of Forgiveness devoted a chapter, 'Crime Against Nature,' to homosexuality. He wrote that a person could 'repent of his perversion' and 'force himself to return to normal pursuits and interests and actions and friendships with the opposite sex,' and that 'this normal pattern can become natural again.'
Klingensmith ran the Cedar City mill that charged the emigrants an exorbitant price, carried orders for the settlements west of Cedar City, took part in the massacre and gathered up the seventeen surviving children afterward. He later left Utah, turned state's evidence and testified against Lee at the 1875 trial, describing a meeting with Brigham Young about the disposal of the emigrants' property.
Law was Joseph Smith's counselor in the First Presidency until he broke with him over plural marriage and the concentration of power in Nauvoo. With his brother Wilson, the Higbees, the Fosters and Charles Ivins he published the single issue of the Nauvoo Expositor on 7 June 1844, printing his own sworn affidavit that Hyrum Smith had read him a revelation authorizing plural marriage.
Lee recruited Paiutes for the initial attack, carried the white flag into the emigrant corral on 11 September and helped direct the killing. He reported the affair to Brigham Young as an Indian action. Excommunicated in 1870, tried twice, convicted in 1876 and shot at the massacre site on 23 March 1877, he was the only person punished. His posthumous confession, published as Mormonism Unveiled, insists he was sacrificed to shield others.
An abolitionist barber in Lowell, Lewis was baptized in the early 1840s and ordained an elder by William Smith. In March 1847 Brigham Young called him one of the best elders in the Church. His son Enoch's marriage to a white woman, reported to Young later that year, is one of the events historians place at the origin of the restriction.
Married to Windsor Lyon and sealed to Joseph Smith in February 1842 or 1843, she told her daughter Josephine on her deathbed in 1882 that Josephine was Joseph Smith's child. For a century that statement was the strongest single case for sexual polyandry. DNA analysis published in 2016 identified Windsor Lyon as Josephine's father.
Marks scheduled the 8 August meeting at Rigdon's request and privately favoured him; Emma Smith wanted Marks himself as trustee-in-trust. He was stripped of his stake presidency, published a notice in December 1844 renouncing Rigdon's 'pretended visions and revelations' and saying the Twelve were the proper persons to lead, then drifted through Strang's church before becoming one of the men who brought Joseph Smith III into the Reorganization.
Marsh left the church on 19 October 1838, the day after Gallatin burned, and five days later swore an affidavit describing the Danite organization, the burning of Gallatin, a "destroying company," and Smith's alleged ambition to "take the State." Orson Hyde attested it. The affidavit reached Boggs and was among the documents that produced the extermination order.
A Petrobras executive in Rio de Janeiro, Martins joined the Church in 1972, accepted the restriction, served as the Church's public spokesman in Brazil, and with his wife Rudá donated to a temple they expected never to enter. Ordained in June 1978, he was sealed in the São Paulo temple that November and in March 1990 became the first General Authority of African descent.
Matis was a returned missionary, former elders quorum president and temple worker who had never been sexually intimate. He died by suicide in February 2000 during the Proposition 22 campaign in California. His parents Fred and Marilyn afterward petitioned successfully for changes to Church language on homosexuality in at least one youth publication and co-wrote a book about his life; they later objected publicly to his death being used 'for a political purpose of any kind.'
McBride's 1976 BYU dissertation, 'Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy,' is the single most-cited document in the aversion-therapy controversy. Seventeen men enrolled and fourteen completed treatment; subjects were shown male and female images while a plethysmograph measured arousal and electric shocks were administered. The study was supervised by D. Eugene Thorne, chair of BYU's psychology department and McBride's committee chairman.
McKay narrowed the restriction's reach — clarifying that Pacific Islanders, Fijians and Australian Aboriginal people could be ordained, and reversing South Africa's lineage-tracing requirement — while endorsing the 1949 statement that called it a direct commandment. He is reported by Sterling McMurrin and others to have privately called it a practice rather than a doctrine, and to have said he had pleaded with the Lord and not received the answer he sought.
Excommunicated in 1838, McLellin launched a rival paper, The Ensign, at Buffalo in Iowa Territory in July 1844 with George M. Hinkle, then joined Sidney Rigdon's church and served as a clerk of Rigdon's April 1845 Pittsburgh conference before falling out again. In 1847 he helped organize a Church of Christ around David Whitmer, collecting testimony that Joseph had ordained Whitmer his successor in 1834.
McMurrin was the most conspicuous Latter-day Saint intellectual of his generation and the one the hierarchy could not touch, because David O. McKay had personally protected him from excommunication. The Seventh East Press interview in which he denied belief in the First Vision and an ancient Book of Mormon, published 11 January 1983, precipitated the paper's ban at BYU and stands as the opening of the modern conflict.
Matthews arrived in Kirtland in November 1835 under an assumed name. Joseph Smith described his beard, his sea-green frock coat and his habit of shutting his eyes while speaking, then told him the story of the vision. The resulting journal entry is the earliest surviving account to describe two personages.
Appointed second counselor in June 1959, two months after the last published expenditure report, Moyle took direction of Church finances and launched a large increase in spending, especially on buildings. Quinn writes that the Church spent $8 million more than it received in 1959, against a $7 million surplus the year before. Moyle is the figure most directly linked in the historical literature to the end of published accounts.
Nelson was the principal draftsman of 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World' over the 1994 Christmas holidays. On 10 January 2016 he told a worldwide young-adult audience that the November 2015 handbook change came when 'the Lord inspired His prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, to declare the mind of the Lord and the will of the Lord,' and that each apostle 'felt a spiritual confirmation.' Three years later, as Church President, he presided over the reversal of that same policy.
AP reporting based on a help-line call log and a deposition transcript, filed in the Arizona Court of Appeals, showed that Nelson took the initial call from the bishop who reported the Adams abuse and had further conversations with two bishops over roughly two years. He was simultaneously a sitting Republican member of the Utah House and a lawyer for the firm that staffs the help line, which is why his role became a public question about the overlap of legislative and institutional-legal interests.
Nibley was assigned to lead the church's response after 1967. He argued that the only evidence for what Smith thought he was translating was the side-by-side arrangement of brief characters with long English passages, that this proves nothing, and that the Kirtland Egyptian Papers were a by-product — either 'studying it out' or an attempt to reverse-engineer a revealed text. Critics, including Thomas Stuart Ferguson, complained that he spent his early articles attacking Spalding's 1912 panel rather than the papyri.
A senior portfolio manager at Ensign Peak Advisors for roughly nine years, Nielsen filed a confidential complaint received by the IRS on 21 November 2019 alleging the Church had amassed about $100 billion in accounts intended for charitable purposes. His twin brother Lars supplied a 74-page synopsis to reporters. Nielsen gave a sworn declaration in the Huntsman case in 2021, a 90-page memorandum to the Senate Finance Committee in January 2023, and a '60 Minutes' interview in May 2023, in which he called the fund 'really a clandestine hedge fund.'
Oaks's April 1989 general conference address 'Alternate Voices' named a category into which independent Mormon publishing and symposia were understood to fall, and it is the text both camps returned to for the next decade. He spoke for the Church on National Public Radio during the 1993 controversy, denying that the councils were a purge. Quinn's memoir reports Oaks telling Steve Benson that the Twelve could not restrain Packer: 'You can't stage manage a grizzly bear.'
Packer's 1981 address to Church Educational System teachers, 'The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,' became the central text of the argument over how Latter-day Saint history should be written. In May 1993 he told the All-Church Coordinating Council that the dangers facing the Church came from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement and 'the so-called scholars or intellectuals.' Several of the disciplined scholars say their local leaders told them Packer was coordinating the 1993 councils; the Church has denied that general authorities directed those decisions.
Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (2002) laid the accounts side by side in parallel columns and argued that a forgiveness epiphany was later rewritten into a divine commission. He was disciplined by the Church over the book; BYU Studies answered it in print.
Hired as Smith's scribe on 29 October 1835, Parrish inscribed Book of Abraham Manuscript–B and, with Phelps, the fuller Manuscript–C. After leaving the church he wrote in 1838 that he had 'set by his side and penned down the Egyptian hieroglyphicks as he claimed to receive it by direct inspiration from heaven' — a hostile witness whose testimony critics read as evidence that characters were being worked from directly.
Known by the Danite code name "Captain Fearnaught," Patten commanded the company that took and burned Gallatin on 18 October 1838, and led the roughly sixty men who attacked Samuel Bogart's state militia detachment at Crooked River a week later. He was mortally wounded in that fight — the act that turned a local conflict into resistance against the state of Missouri.
Petrey's Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism (2020) is the academic account the other camps argue with. He traces Church discourse from a sin frame to a medical frame to a psychological frame and argues that teachings which are asserted to be eternal have in fact required constant enforcement. The book won the Mormon History Association's best-book award and drew book-length rebuttals from the Interpreter Foundation and BYU Studies.
Phelps wrote to his wife Sally in July 1835 that Smith 'knew what they were' and intended to 'translate and print them in a book,' and in September that 'nothing has been doing in the translation of the Egyptian Record for a long time.' He inscribed most of the bound Grammar and Alphabet volume, one of the three Egyptian Alphabet documents, and the prefatory material of Book of Abraham Manuscript–C. How much of the Egyptian-language project was his rather than Smith's is itself a live argument.
Brigham Young assigned Pratt to make the first public defense of plural marriage at the special conference of 28–29 August 1852. His discourse set the terms of every later Mormon defense: modern revelation, constitutional protection, the promises to Abraham, and the claim that monogamy bred immorality. He was then sent to Washington to publish The Seer in defense of the doctrine.
Hired onto Leonard Arrington's History Division as a graduate student in 1972, Quinn became the most prominent scholar among the six. His 1985 Dialogue article on plural marriages authorized after the 1890 Manifesto, and his 1992 essay arguing that Mormon women had held priesthood since 1843, were named by his stake president in the written accusation of apostasy delivered to his door in February 1993. He refused to attend his own council and was excommunicated in September 1993.
Secretary to Brigham Young and husband of two wives, Reynolds volunteered as the defendant in an arranged prosecution meant to test the Morrill Act. The Supreme Court's unanimous 1879 ruling against him held that religious belief was protected but religious practice was not, and it remains a foundation of American free-exercise law.
Rezendes, formerly of the Boston Globe Spotlight team, published the August 2022 AP investigation of the Bisbee, Arizona case, built on thousands of pages of sealed court records. His reporting introduced the phrase "help line" to a national audience and produced the follow-up story identifying the Kirton McConkie attorney who took the first call. Nearly every subsequent argument, in either direction, is a response to his account.
The last surviving member of the First Presidency and Joseph Smith's vice-presidential running mate, sent to Pittsburgh nine days before the martyrdom. He hurried back and asked the Saints to appoint him 'guardian' of the church, not its president, on the theory that the church could only ever be built up to the dead prophet. Beaten on 8 August and excommunicated on 8 September, he organized his own church in Pittsburgh and argued his case in his own newspaper for two years.
Baer's successor at the Oriental Institute, Ritner revisited the Hor document in Dialogue in 2000 and later published a full translation of the whole Joseph Smith collection. He concluded that changes from Baer's reading 'are few and do not challenge his basic understanding of the text,' defended the 1912 Egyptologists against Nibley's attacks on them, and wrote a point-by-point response to the Church's 2014 Gospel Topics essay.
Rytting appears throughout the litigation record as the Church officer who manages abuse exposure. His emails to insurers during the 2018 West Virginia trial, later unsealed in the Church's suit against those insurers, record settlement positions in dollar terms. FLOODLIT's contention that his 2012 sworn statement that "the first lawsuit against the Church relating to sexual abuse was brought in 1989" is contradicted by a 1984 Arizona filing is the sharpest documentary challenge to the Church's account of its own institutional memory.
Scott gave the two most-cited general conference addresses on abuse, in April 1992 and April 2008, and is the Church's standard citation for the teaching that victims of abuse are not guilty of sin. The 1992 address also cautioned against "excessive probing into every minute detail of your past experiences" and against therapy that might produce false accusation — language critics read as discouraging disclosure and defenders read as a warning against the recovered-memory practices of that decade.
Wrote for Joseph before Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery, and in her 1879 'Last Testimony' described sitting at the table while he dictated with his face in the hat. She also distinguished the instruments: the interpreters for the lost portion, and afterward 'a small stone, not exactly black, but was rather a dark color.' Her account is used by every camp because she was in the room and had no institutional reason to flatter the Utah church.
Her family memoir is the fullest narrative source for the household during the plates years, including the scene when Martin Harris returned without the manuscript and Joseph cried 'All is lost! all is lost!' She also recorded her husband's treasure-seeking and dream-visions, material that later historians read as the matrix out of which the plates narrative grew.
Emma opposed plural marriage, briefly consented to four of the sealings in May 1843 on condition she choose the wives, and signed public statements denying any system of marriage other than monogamy. She reportedly burned a copy of the revelation in August 1843. In her last recorded interview, in 1879, she denied her husband had ever had another wife.
The January 1841 revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 124 gave Hyrum the office of Patriarch by right of birth and the keys, priesthood and gifts once held by Oliver Cowdery, and appointed him 'a prophet, and a seer, and a revelator unto my church, as well as my servant Joseph.' On paper he was the clearest successor Joseph ever named. He died in the same room at Carthage, which removed that answer at the moment the question arose.
The last surviving brother of Joseph and Hyrum. Ordained Presiding Patriarch in May 1845, he spent that summer arguing that the office carried the right to lead and that 'little Joseph' was the rightful heir, published a pamphlet in October 1845 attacking Brigham Young, and was cut off. He then attached himself to Strang, later to Lyman Wight, and his teaching of lineal priesthood fed directly into the Reorganization.
Smith announced at April 1907 conference that the Church owed 'not a dollar that it cannot pay at once.' Under pressure from the 1904–07 Senate investigation of Reed Smoot, he acknowledged in 1904 that general authorities were supported from tithing, and in 1915 began the annual disclosure of how tithing was disbursed — describing it as a liberty he took because of the 'false charges' made against him. He also told, repeatedly, the story of his widowed mother insisting on paying tithing in potatoes.
Smith toured the southern settlements from early August 1857 carrying Brigham Young's war instructions — save the grain, sell nothing to passing emigrants, put the militia on alert. By his own account in the Journal of Discourses his preaching 'partook of the military more than the religious.' Critics read that tour as the transmission of an order; the Church's account reads it as instructions that contributed to a climate of hostility without authorizing the crime.
Elected by the Utah legislature in January 1903 while serving as an apostle, Smoot was a monogamist whose seat became the occasion for a four-year Senate investigation of the church itself. The Senate finally voted in February 1907 to let him keep it. His diaries are the closest thing to an insider's running account of the hearings.
Snow organized and spoke at the mass meetings of January 1870 in which Latter-day Saint women publicly defended plural marriage and their own agency in choosing it. She told the Great Indignation Meeting that the women of Utah had been misrepresented and had remained silent too long. She launched the Woman's Exponent in 1872 and died months after the Edmunds–Tucker Act stripped Utah women of the vote.
Snow inherited a Church near bankruptcy in 1898 and made getting it out of debt his first priority. In May 1899, at St. George, he received what he described as a revelation on tithing and spent the rest of his life preaching a tithing reformation across the stakes. He told a Salt Lake audience on 30 May 1899 that the Church had 'no reserve at all.' The tithing discipline he established is the direct ancestor of the modern Church's finances.
Wrote an unpublished romance about ancient American mound-builders around 1812 and died in 1816. Eight of his former neighbours told Hurlbut in 1833 that they remembered names and episodes shared with the Book of Mormon. The manuscript recovered in Honolulu in 1884 bore little resemblance to it, which is why nearly every camp now treats the Spalding theory as dead — while a small critical minority argues a second manuscript existed.
In 1912 Spalding mailed the three facsimiles to eight Egyptologists and Assyriologists — Sayce, Petrie, Breasted, Mace, Peters, Mercer, Meyer and von Bissing — and published their replies as 'Joseph Smith, Jr., As a Translator.' He reported that 'in no case did one man know the opinion of another' and that agreement among them was practically complete. He is not to be confused with Solomon Spalding of the Book of Mormon authorship theory.
Baptized by Joseph Smith in February 1844 and ordained an elder by Hyrum, Strang produced a letter dated 18 June 1844 appointing him successor, claimed an angelic ordination on the very day of the martyrdom, and in September 1845 unearthed engraved plates at Voree, Wisconsin. He drew in Martin Harris, three Whitmers, William Smith and Lucy Mack Smith before polygamy and a royal coronation cost him most of them. He was assassinated in 1856.
Taylor refused to yield on plural marriage under the Edmunds Act, told the Saints in his last public sermon that no man had a right to control his conscience, and went into hiding in 1885. He died on the underground in July 1887. A document in his hand dated 27 September 1886 became, decades later, the foundation text of Mormon fundamentalism.
A Salt Lake City lawyer and co-founder of the Mormon Alliance, Toscano published 'A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love not Power' in the same Dialogue issue as Anderson's chronology. His August 1993 Sunstone address, 'All Is Not Well in Zion: False Teachings of the True Church,' was transcribed from a purchased cassette and became the focus of his 19 September 1993 council. His wife Margaret Toscano was excommunicated in 2000 for her writing on Heavenly Mother and women's ordination.
Walters searched Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist records for the 1820 revival Joseph Smith described and could not find it, then found the Reverend George Lane's own account of a Palmyra revival that began in 1824. His 1967 study forced a generation of Latter-day Saint scholarship into the archives after him.
Wells edited the Woman's Exponent through the whole antipolygamy campaign, arguing in print that plural marriage enlarged rather than diminished women. She lobbied Congress and the National Woman Suffrage Association against disfranchisement. Her private diaries record a very different experience of the same marriage, including her husband's indifference.
Whitesides spoke publicly on the Mother in Heaven and on women's spiritual authority. Hers was the first council of the month, on 14 September 1993, and the only one held at ward rather than stake level; her bishop barred even her husband from attending. She was disfellowshipped rather than excommunicated, appealed, and was denied. She has since said the discipline opened a spiritual world she had not known was possible.
Hosted the completion of the translation at his father's Fayette farm and was one of the Three Witnesses. He left the church permanently in 1838 and spent fifty years as a non-Mormon in Richmond, Missouri, repeatedly reaffirming the vision while rejecting Joseph Smith's later leadership. His 1887 Address to All Believers in Christ is both the best-known description of the seer-stone-in-hat method and a sweeping repudiation of the church.
Sealed to Joseph Smith in May 1843, some three months before her fifteenth birthday, after her father Heber C. Kimball proposed the match. She later became one of plural marriage's most articulate public defenders while also writing about the grief the sealing caused her and her mother. Whether the marriage was conjugal is disputed and undetermined.
Wight had run the Black River pine operations in Wisconsin and had been called by Joseph Smith, with George Miller, to a mission to Texas. He took his pine company south in 1845 and founded Mormon villages near Austin and at Zodiac. He held that the Council of Fifty, not the Twelve, carried Joseph's authority, and that Joseph Smith III was the eventual leader. The Twelve disfellowshipped him in December 1848.
Williams inscribed Book of Abraham Manuscript–A, closely paralleling Parrish's Manuscript–B; the Joseph Smith Papers editors judge that large portions of the two were created and revised simultaneously, probably from dictation. Two insertions in Williams's hand point the reader to the sacrifice vignette, tying the English text to the illustration published as Facsimile 1. The mummies were kept at his house at least into November 1835.
As president he issued the Manifesto of 24 September 1890 after concluding that continued practice would cost the church its temples and its leadership. He later told congregations at Brigham City and Logan that the Lord had shown him by vision what would happen if the practice were not stopped. In 1891 he testified under oath that the Manifesto was intended to end cohabitation as well as new marriages, and in the years afterward he authorized a small number of plural marriages in Mexico.
Woolley claimed to have been present at John Taylor's hiding place in Centerville in September 1886 when Taylor received a revelation refusing to revoke the everlasting covenant. In accounts given in 1912 and elaborated in 1929 he said Taylor also ordained five men to keep plural marriage alive whatever the church did. Most Mormon fundamentalist groups trace their priesthood claims to that account.
Orphaned daughter of Bishop Edward Partridge, she lived in the Smith home and was sealed to Joseph Smith on 4 March 1843 without Emma's knowledge, then sealed again on 11 May in Emma's presence after Emma chose her. Her autobiography and her sworn 1892 Temple Lot testimony are among the most detailed first-person accounts of a plural marriage in Nauvoo, including of its conjugal character.
Young was simultaneously president of the Church, governor of Utah Territory and superintendent of Indian affairs when the massacre occurred. His Reformation sermons and his war-footing instructions of summer 1857 shaped the atmosphere in southern Utah; his 10 September 1857 reply to Isaac Haight told the settlers to let the emigrants 'go in peace,' but it arrived two days after the killings. He blamed Indians publicly for years afterward, and in his 1875 deposition denied any role in planning or in the disposal of the emigrants' property.
Young campaigned publicly from 2017 to end one-on-one interviews in which bishops ask minors sexually explicit questions, collecting accounts from members and staging a hunger strike and a march. In March 2018 the First Presidency announced that children, youth and women could invite an adult into such interviews. Young was excommunicated in September 2018. He is the clearest case in this topic of a member-driven campaign that produced a policy change and cost the campaigner his membership.
