Sharalyn has been employed by the Church History Department since the year 2000 as an archivist and as a document specialist for The Joseph Smith Papers—almost before it was the Joseph Smith Papers.

Laura H. Hales: Tell us a little bit about that.

Part of the reason we wanted to do this was because there’s more information going on in the records than what is written, and it can become problematic to approach sources with the sole intent to mine information. Using a critical approach to the records reveals some insights that aren’t explicitly stated in the historical sources.

Some of the chapters do delve into provenance. For example, my chapter on the Lucy Mack Smith history delves into the provenance in part because it has been so thoroughly misunderstood. Other chapters explore the context of records and their production, transmission, and reception.

This isn’t really a book for the layman, but it’s not strictly for the historian. What audiences were you targeting?

We also wanted to unwind some of the misperceptions that have occurred in the past with some of these records. For example, prior to Dean Jessee writing his article on the Joseph Smith history, a lot of people would take the seven volume History of the Church and say, “Oh, Joseph Smith said this.” Similarly, with the Lucy Mack Smith history, “According to Lucy, this is what happened.” What Dean did for the Mormon scholarly community was dissect Joseph Smith’s history and say, “Hey, it is not what we think it is.” There are many times in the History of the Church where the narrative is written in first-person as though Joseph Smith wrote it. Well, it was actually Willard Richards, William Clayton, and a host of other scribes who did the writing. It was a multi-scribed history that took decades of work—much of it occurring way after Joseph Smith died.

You talked about being able to add more nuance to historical research. How does this book give historians the tools to do that?

You go through and show what it is in the rough draft and how the Corays revised it. As an amateur, not as a documentary specialist, but as an editor, it seems to me, substantively, we can reasonably accept that Lucy gave this information to the Corays. It might not be word-for- word what happened, but it grabs the essence of what happened years later and what more could you do at that point?

The Lucy Mack Smith history is a product of social publication. That’s probably a term unfamiliar to most readers of Mormon history. It’s a multi-faceted approach to publishing. Social publication is a sense of trying out texts on audiences before broader distribution. For example, Lucy Mack told her son William she had recited the history of the Smiths over and over to the point of destroying her lungs. She decides to commit her history to print. This is very much in the vein of social publication. She’s trying out this text on audiences. She’s telling people a narrative of her family. This telling and retelling essentially is creating a narrative she builds upon each time she tells it. By the time the history is actually written, the history of her family is very much a part of her life and her experience. She’s not building this from scratch because she’s been telling the story over and over again.

But there’s also publishing that occurs through multiple scribal copies that are read aloud. So, you have all of these things at play in the history. It’s simply not what we’re used to. When we talk about someone writing their history, we think that they are the sole source of information. and that they wouldn’t throw in all these other texts. Social publication is a distinct process that Lucy inherited from her New England forbearers.

You have to ask yourself, “What in the world is going on here?” First of all, we know a selection process has occurred. For some reason, some of these visions simply weren’t considered important, or not as important as others. Someone is deciding what to include or exclude.  Second, one has to question who is telling these visions. Is it Joseph Smith Sr. or is it Lucy Mack Smith? It’s clear Lucy is pulling the visions from a precursor text. You become very aware that there’s a filter here, and the filter is Lucy.

As much as we want to believe that this is an authentic experience of Joseph Smith Sr., there is an intermediary present in the copying of the text. Then that text is further copied by Martha Coray. Martha’s copies of the dreams are dated to the mid-1840s, but where is the original text? Where is the physical copy that pre-dates Martha’s copy? It is all very complicated.

Let’s leave the technical behind. Let’s talk about some of the fun. What were some of the fun things you found when you were doing this research?

It was absolutely delightful to see the paratextual insertions and amusing asides. I enjoyed seeing how the Corays confronted their experience compiling the history and how they in some respects wove themselves into the narrative.

There are several times in the Joseph Smith history—some very emotional instances —where Howard kind of pulls back. If you compare Howard’s copy of JS’s history with James Mulholland’s copy, the texts and how they’re working on things, there is a sense of Howard trying to remove emotive elements or keep them emotionally neutral. Considering this in light of the Lucy Mack Smith history, there are parts where Martha instructs the reviser to express sympathies at length at the death of Joseph Smith Sr. or express the grief of the widow that are ultimately removed. But the thing that is interesting … this I did not include in the chapter. That is the part that’s frustrating. Anyone who writes chapters or articles faces the moment when it is pried out of their hands to be published. And then new things continue to be found.

Back to the part that was not included but should have been in the chapter. In the final paragraphs of the fair copy, there is a winding up scene that does not appear in the rough manuscript. It is a point where Lucy Mack details the persecution and the tribulation of the Smith family. She concludes the record with an appeal for divine retribution at the judgment bar of God for what has happened to the Smith family. And it is scathing. Now readers probably think, “Oh, this is a hefty way of winding up the history,” but we have to understand what has occurred as the history is being written. The trial for the accused murderers of Joseph and Hyrum Smith was held in May 1845. It is the backdrop for writing Lucy’s history. Her history concludes with the understanding that retribution will not occur in mortality; the trial going on in Carthage is not providing the family justice for the death of Joseph and Hyrum.

You get this emotive experience at the end, that’s very moving, very powerful. And the emotion is not censored as it has been in earlier parts of the history. I find that fascinating. Who allowed this torrent of emotion to remain? I don’t know what to make of it, but I find it very telling of the compromises made in producing the history.