Research Notes
As we conduct our research, we are regularly making new discoveries about the places of LDS history, and about techniques for historical GIS. We are publishing our major findings through traditional outlets, but for many of our more specific discoveries, we want to document the reasoning behind the data you see in MormonPlaces. Many of these are draft papers about working theories, not polished results; feedback and corrections are more than welcome.- December 2025: This Branch of the Church: Part 4, Maturing Practice(s), 1860-1877, BYU Studies, 64:4 (Fall 2025) in press. The four-part series ends as earlier trends in local administration are entrenched and sometimes changed, leading up to the widespread standardization of the 1877 Priesthood Reorganization.
- September 2025: This Branch of the Church: Part 3, Administering an Expanding Territory, 1852-1859, BYU Studies, 64:3 (Summer 2025), 205. Third in the series, covering the expansion of many kinds of congregations and regional administration as Utah is settled.
- June 2025: This Branch of the Church: Part 2, The Church in Flux, 1846-1851, BYU Studies, 64:2 (Spring 2025) 139. Second in the series, covering the unique administration in the Winter Quarters and Kanesville Iowa area, and the earliest organizations in Utah Territory.
- April 2025: This Branch of the Church: The Early Development of Local Administration in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Part 1, The Emergent Church, 1830–1845, BYU Studies, 64:1 (Winter 2025) 45-80. This is the first of a series of four articles we've been working on for several years on the evolution of wards, branches, and stakes from 1830 to the Priesthood Reorganization of 1877. This first installment introduces many ways in which terms that are familiar to us, such as bishop and branch, meant very different things to the early saints than they do to us. Why does everything I do keep returning to cognition, linguistics, and ontology?
- December 2021: Mapping regions with partially defined boundaries, Transactions in GIS, DOI:10.1111/tgis.12884. Discusses the algorithm used in MormonPlaces to estimate the jurisdiction of wards and branches (the blue blobs), even when the boundaries are not completely defined.
- January 2019: A Qualified Assertion Database for the History of Places, International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 13 (1):95-115, DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2019.0233. Discusses the historial GIS data model for MormonPlaces
- February 2018: Macedonia was not Macedonia. For decades, we have assumed that the town of Macedonia in Pottawattamie County, Iowa was the location of the Macedonia LDS branch (1847-1852), despite its contradictions with local histories. They're right and we're wrong. Probably.
- January 2018: Locating the Winter Quarters Wards. Most maps of the layout of the 22 wards in Winter Quarters are probably incorrect. Here's why, and some possible improvements, including the short-lived 13 wards .
This Branch of the Church Notes
As promised in the articles, I am posting my detailed notes on which the articles were based. Below are timelines for each stake or region, with detailed citations. They are in a raw form, as research notes should be, but if you find them useful, let me know. Most of the most substantial events (esp. organization/disorganization) are also documented in the respective entity pages in MormonPlaces.- General Timeline of events and quotes relevant to the whole Church
- Arizona, brand new pioneer settlements in 1877
- Bear Lake Valley, Idaho/Utah, stake 1864 under apostle Charles C. Rich
- Beaver, a very small stake organized in 1869
- Box Elder, Utah/Idaho, Brigham City, apostolate under Lorenzo Snow
- Cache Valley, Utah/Idaho, Logan, stake 1859, then apostolate under E.T. Benson and Brigham Young Jr.
- Carson Valley, now Nevada, a short-lived stake overseen by apostle Orson Hyde in 1856-1857
- Cedar Stake, a short-lived (1855-1859) spinoff from Parowan Stake
- Davis County, part of Salt Lake Stake until it was organized as its own stake in 1877
- Juab County, a very small stake organized in 1869
- Kane County, part of St. George Stake from its settlement in 1864 until its own stake was organized in 1877
- Kirtland, Ohio, the first Stake in the Church
- Millard County, Fillmore, regional bishopric then a stake in 1869
- Morgan County, a regional bishopric 1861-1877
- Nauvoo, pending
- Panguitch County, a few scattered settlements organized into a stake in 1877
- Parowan, the mother stake (1851) of southern Utah
- Pottawattamie County, western Iowa, a region with dozens of branches 1846-1852
- Salt Lake Stake, the largest stake in Utah
- St. George Stake, and the Southern Mission
- St. Louis Stake, Missouri, during its short life (1855-1858), the only "Mission Field" stake until the 1920s
- San Bernardino Stake, California, a colony-stake-apostolate in southern California 1851-1857 led by Charles C. Rich and Amasa Lyman
- Sanpete County, an early stake that became an apostolate under Orson Hyde
- Sevier Valley, an outgrowth of Sanpete Valley that had its own stake in 1875
- Summit County, a regional bishopric (or two) 1865-1877
- Tooele County, the original regional bishopric (1853-1877)
- Utah County, Provo, one of the early stakes (1851)
- Wasatch County, regional bishopric 1861-1877
- Weber County, Ogden, another of the central stakes
- Winter Quarters, Nebraska, a large but temporary settlement divided into several wards
- The Church in Zion, not a stake 1831-1837, until the Saints resettled in Far West