Welcome! MormonPlaces is an interactive database (a gazetteer) of the geographic locations that are significant to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its sister churches of Joseph Smith's Restoration movement. This will eventually include congregations, settlements, cemeteries, buildings, and even historical events.
MormonPlaces is an outgrowth of Mapping Mormonism: an Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, in which we collected information on thousands of places from various regions, eras, and topics. This project builds on that with the following goals:
- Help historians, family historians, and the general public easily access detailed information about places.
- Enable other web services to connect to relevant places. For example, to state that person X (in FamilySearch) was the bishop of ward Y (in MormonPlaces).
- Allow other scholars to add to and improve the data based on their own sources and research, much like a wiki. If you are interested in contributing, let me know.
What's New
- September 2023: Thanks to a tip from a user, I worked through a source for the early Church in Florida (1895-1926). Lots of clarifications, lots of new units, lots of new questions!
- July 2023: We made the BYU homepage, with an article about MormonPlaces to celebrate Pioneer Day. It focuses on the historical meetinghouse data and my (still unpublished) work on the pre-1877 evolution of wards and branches.
- January-April 2023: Lots of work on British branches around London and other cities, using some new online sources.
- April 2022: Lots of work on British branches, especially in Wales (thanks especially to Ronald Dennis' translations of Welsh Church periodicals). I also created a new page that lists Places we can't find. Maybe you can help find them!
- March 2022: Some feedback from a member in the Birmingham area got me working on several British conferences in the late 1840s and early 1850s, especially the Birmingham Conference. This is an especially difficult era; the Church was growing so fast in Britain (by 1850, there were far more members in Britain than in the U.S./Utah) that they kind of gave up reporting individual branches in the usual sources like the Millennial Star.
- February 2022: Started some revisions on Nauvoo-era stakes and branches, using the remaining branch records that are now digital.
- January 2022: Working on early Central Utah (Sanpete and Sevier Stakes, 1849-1877)