About Us

In the summer of 1974 I received a summer fellowship at the Church Historical Department, and the following summer, having completed my exams at the Graduate Theological Union, I returned to Salt Lake. Leonard Arrington asked if I would be interested in researching the Joseph F. Smith papers, which had just been turned over to the department. He suggested I might want to write a biography. Thus began nearly six years of intensive research at the Archives.

The dissertation was never written. The biography was hard because there seemed no end to the "context" research. I found a lot of wonderful material—diaries and correspondence of associates who themselves deserved greater exposure, but to tell their stories would divert me from Joseph F.

The Internet provides a great vehicle for readers to follow their interests (if material is properly linked). I can still make Frank Hammond's great diary available, for example, without getting too far afield from Joseph F.

Acknowledgment: I have now been diverted from Joseph F. to his uncle, Joseph until 1905.

The name of this site is borrowed from a book by Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington and Assistant Church Historian Davis Bitton. Saints Without Halos: The Human Side of Mormon History tells the stories of sixteen men and women, all

committed to the restored gospel, although some understood it differently than others. All had their burdens to bear, which they did in their own ways and with varying degrees of success. They are not objects of veneration but human beings who, like the rest of us, struggle to be worthy of the title Latter-day Saint. They are Saints without halos.

There are three aspects of the book I hope carry over to this website:

• Differences can be enlightening and should be explored, not hidden
• Try to understand people where they are or were
• Let people speak for themselves

Three types of links are used.

• Colored, underlined text in the rightmost column takes you the associated bibliographic entry on the Works Cited page. To return to the page you came from, click Back.
• In the center or rightmost columns, the symbol ¶ followed by text takes you to a related paragraph on another page. For example, ¶ Solomon Mack will take you to the Solomon Mack biographical sketch—either to the beginning of the page or to a specific paragraph on the page, depending on the context of the paragraph you are leaving. To return to the page you came from, click Back.
• Footnotes. Simple citations and brief notes appear in the rightmost column of the page. More extended footnotes appear at the bottom of the page. Click † to go from the text to the note, and ‡ to return from the note to the text.
• Sequences. The > or < link or next or previous related paragraph when non-related paragraphs intervene. For example, a paragraph in a chronology may deal with the political division of Latter-day Saints along national party lines, followed by one or more non-related paragraphs. Click > to jump forward to the next related paragraph or < to jump to the previous related paragraph.

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