We are excited to announce our next series—beginning next week on Tuesday—where we will be dealing with the history surrounding succession in Church leadership, beginning with the crisis of 1844 which grew out of the immediate aftermath of the tragic murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. In next week’s first episode, Casey and I will walk through no less than 8 possible succession paths that were either explicitly laid out by Joseph Smith or were viewed as entirely plausible based on certain interpretations of statements Joseph made or actions he took. It was a fun episode to record together and it really helps us to understand why succession in the presidency wasn’t immediately cut and dry in the minds of many Church members in 1844 AND to understand the basis on which several other branches of the Restoration exist, even today, outside of the one initially led by Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles out to Utah. So we hope you will join us next week as we begin what promises to be a fascinating in-depth series on Succession in the Presidency.

Welcome to our final episode in this series where we’ve been exploring all things related to the history of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Today on Church History Matters Casey sits down with Sam Weston, a docent at the Church History Museum who has been seriously researching the martyrdom at Carthage Jail in meticulous detail for the last 15 years. They discuss the event of the attack at Carthage from something of a forensic crime scene investigation perspective—both challenging and confirming prior scholarship on the topic.

In 1952 book entitled, The Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith, was published by N. B. Lundwall. Within its pages, among other things, Lundwall presented various stories describing how many of those who played significant roles in the persecution of Joseph Smith met with unfortunate ends in unnatural and sometimes gruesome ways, underscoring the idea of divine justice and retribution. Unfortunately, the historical credibility of most of these stories is seriously lacking since they are based on unverifiable hearsay rather than well-documented and corroborated records. These morbid tales are thus the stuff of legend and folklore rather than a robust documentary record. But they do stimulate the question: What do we know about what actually happened to those involved in the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith? Were they ever brought to justice? Did they live long lives? Did any of them meet a tragic mortal end?

In this episode of Church History Matters, we investigate the answers to these questions based primarily in the solid historical research of Marvin S. Hill and Dallin H. Oaks.

For show notes and transcript for this and other episodes go to https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/church-history-matters-podcast/