Brigham Young Papers

While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints completed the final volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers project, The Brigham Young Center began its work to bring together and make available the papers of Brigham Young, second president of the Church of Jesus Christ.

“The [Brigham Young] Center is committed to growing and maintaining a repository of research materials that help scholars understand and document the life and times of Brigham Young. This repository will grow month by month, but given the scope of extant documents, posting most of Young’s documents will require years.”[1]

The Center plans to make the bulk of Young’s documents available online, with a small subset published in print.

Members of the Board of the Brigham Young Center Foundation include noted historian and scholars John D. Esplin, Ronald K. Esplin, Richard E. Turley Jr., Jeffrey N. Walker, and John W. Welch.

The Joseph Smith Papers project was manageable due to his shorter lifespan, “but it took us more than 20 years [with Church resources],” Esplin said. The Church is supportive of the Brigham Young Papers but could not devote the same resources to a project that would likely span many decades, Esplin said.[2] The main source of funding comes from John D. Esplin and Jan Quan Esplin, Ronald Esplin’s son and daughter-in-law. “This exists with outside donations,” Ronald Esplin said. “We have cooperation and coordination from the Church, which is essential because the Church owns the documents.”[3]

The Brigham Young Papers project begins with ‘’The Brigham Young Journals Volume 1: April 1832–February 1846’’, edited by historians Ronald K. Esplin, Dean C. Jessee, Brent M. Rogers, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Andrew H. Hedges, and produced under the imprimatur of BYU Press.

The first volume was completed in five years with the historians and editors working part-time hours beyond their normal full-time jobs. They all worked on the Joseph Smith Papers and other projects.

The first volume features editorial overviews, extensive annotation, detailed physical descriptions of each journal and photographs. There are reference materials, including maps, a chronology, and trip itineraries.

Future journal volumes pick up in the 1850s and continue through the early 1860s, when Esplin said “inexplicably, they stop.” Young did not keep a diary the final 14 years of his life before his death in 1877.