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
- July 2024: Worked through some sources for the Northwestern States Mission from the 1890s through the 1920s; not a lot of new branches, but found better information for many branches and conferences (districts).
- June 12 2024: I entered several historical sites, such as locations where Doctrine and Covenants revelations were received. Yes, I need to enter a lot more of these, which shouldn't be hard given the volume of data collected for Mapping Mormonism.
- May 2024: Thanks to a tip from one of our users, I worked through some missionary journals that cleared up a couple dozen British branches in the 1850s, especially around Norwich, Worcester, and Manchester
- 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-August 2023: As part of a BYU study abroad I helped run that focused on British Church History, the students did in-depth research on branches where their ancestors were converted, which was incorporated into MormonPlaces.
- 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 It focuses on the historical meetinghouse data and my (still unpublished) work on the pre-1877 evolution of wards and branches.