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.- 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 .