Of The Brethren History

Working With "Of The Brethren History" — A Practical Guide

I've spent more years than I care to count digging through church historical archives, oral histories, and digitized record collections related to Latter-day Saint history. People sometimes refer to this body of material as "Of The Brethren History," and I've run into the same frustrations you probably have: fragmented sources, contradictory accounts, and way too much material that sits behind paywalls or requires physical access. This guide is meant to cut through some of that noise. The first thing most people don't realize is that "Of The Brethren History" isn't a single unified collection. It's really several overlapping bodies of material, each with its own access rules and quirks. You've got the Church History Department at BYU, the LDS Church Archives at the main library in Salt Lake, the Joseph Smith Papers Project, and various independent repositories like the Utah State Historical Society and the Benson Library at Brigham Young University. Each has different finding aids, different access policies, and different digital availability. If you're starting fresh, I'd recommend beginning with the Joseph Smith Papers website. It's the most complete open-access project for primary-source documents from the early church period. The digital editions are carefully transcribed and cross-referenced. The journal volume alone covers roughly 1832 to 1844 and contains thousands of individual documents. The problem is that it only covers one slice of the timeline, so you'll move on quickly.

The LDS Church Archives Research Catalog (search.lds.org) is the next logical step. It indexes record groups across multiple institutional repositories. The interface is dated, and the search algorithm is not great, but the index is comprehensive. A trick that actually helps: search by "series number" rather than keyword when you can. Each collection at the church archives has a series designation, and pulling those directly saves you from the results-thin-and-mixed quality you get from keyword queries.

Understanding the Source Material

The primary sources you'll encounter fall into roughly four categories: personal journals and diaries, official church correspondence and minutes, administrative and business records, and oral history interviews. Each category has distinct limitations that most introductory guides don't mention. Personal journals from the 1830s through 1860s are abundant but unreliable as standalone evidence. Authors were writing for themselves, often about events they'd experienced years earlier, often without dates. A man might describe a meeting that happened on a Tuesday, but his journal entry might be dated weeks later. I once spent three days trying to reconcile a timeline from a diary entry only to discover the author had copied the account from someone else's journal without attribution. That's not uncommon in this material. Official correspondence is more reliable chronologically but suffers from different problems. Letters were often drafted for a public audience even when addressed privately. The tone, content, and omissions all reflect that awareness. When I was researching a specific dispute in the 1850s involving a regional leader, the extant letters showed him as cooperative and measured. Local oral histories recorded decades later told a very different story. The truth was somewhere in between, and the letters alone would have given you the wrong picture.

The administrative records—meeting minutes, financial accounts, property transactions—are where most researchers end up spending the most time. They're dry, they're fragmented, and they contain the factual backbone of the history. The Deseret News archives are useful for this, but only up to about 1968 before the coverage becomes more sporadic. After that, you're mostly looking at internal church publications like the Ensign and Liahona, which serve a different purpose than a news record.

A Practical Workflow

Here's how I actually work through a research question. I start by defining what I'm trying to establish, then I map out which source types would bear on it. Journals first, because they're unstructured and you learn the texture of the period. Then correspondence, then minutes and administrative records. Then I look for secondary scholarship that addresses the same topic to identify gaps in my own research. The digital tools available now make this significantly faster than it used to be. The Church History app has the Complete Works of Joseph Smith database built in. The Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts has some material that overlaps with early Latter-day Saint sources. And of course the FamilySearch catalog indexes millions of records, though the relevance to "Of The Brethren History" specifically varies widely by collection. One specific problem I ran into a couple years ago: I was trying to trace the movement of a particular branch through the 1840s in Illinois. The branch records were scattered across at least five different collections, some indexed, many not. A few were listed in the Archives Catalog but linked to finding aids that didn't match the descriptions. My workaround was to pull the original minutes from the Carthage Jail area records, cross-reference names against the nauvoo ward membership rolls in the FamilySearch database, and then verify dates against the community newspapers. It took about six hours of focused work that would have taken two days using only the catalog search. The key was treating the catalog as a starting point rather than a destination.

Common Pitfalls

Beginners make the same mistakes repeatedly. The biggest one is treating church-sanctioned histories as neutral records. The Historian's Office publications, the Improvement Era, the Journal of Discourses—these are interpretive works, not raw sources. They shaped the narrative. Reading them for factual detail without checking against primary documents is how you end up repeating established myths as fact. The second common error is assuming that absence of evidence means evidence of absence. Just because a meeting isn't recorded in the surviving minutes doesn't mean it didn't happen. Fires, floods, lost shipments, deliberate destruction—this material survived selectively. The 1838 Missouri expulsion, for example, destroyed or scattered a significant portion of early church records. What exists is the survivor set, not the complete set. There's also a tendency to over-index on the earliest period. The 1820s through the 1840s generate the most interest and the most research, but the 1850s through the 1890s in Utah territory contain an enormous amount of material that's far less studied and often more directly useful for understanding how the religion actually functioned day to day. The church was operating as a quasi-government, managing irrigation disputes, election interference, taxation, and interfaith relations. The records from that period tell you more about how ordinary members lived than the foundational narratives do.

What This Approach Won't Give You

I should be direct about the limitations. "Of The Brethren History" as a research pursuit is expensive in terms of time. Even with digital tools, meaningful primary source research requires reading hundreds of documents to get a grip on a single topic. The oral histories are particularly time-intensive because they're often untranscribed or only partially transcribed. The church has been working on oral history digitization for years, but large portions remain inaccessible in usable form. Some topics simply cannot be resolved with available sources. Disputes about leadership succession, certain doctrinal developments, internal politics—these often leave paper trails that are deliberately incomplete. No amount of digging will fill every gap. Accepting that early saves a lot of frustration. If your interest is more biographical than institutional, the approach changes. You'd be better served by local history collections, county records, census data, and personal papers that may be held at university special collections rather than church archives. The church repositories focus on institutional history, not individual lives, and they'll send you elsewhere for that material anyway.

The most useful single resource I can point you to is the Church History Bibliography, maintained by the Brigham Young University History Department. It indexes scholarly articles, books, theses, and dissertations covering all aspects of Latter-day Saint history. It's free to access and updated continuously. I check it at the start of every research project to avoid duplicating work that's already been done. From there, the path depends entirely on what you're trying to find out. The sources are there, they're accessible, and they're not going to give you easy answers. That's just how this kind of work goes.