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.

Currently, we are focused on documenting every ward and branch that existed in the LDS Church between 1830 and 1930. So far, we have documented over 7,000 of them! Try it out and give us your feedback. Do you have access to better data on local congregations and want to contribute? Contact me and we can add you to our editor beta program.

What's New

• Fall 2024: Currently, I am using our soon-to-be-published work on pre-1877 Utah to better document the early history of hundreds of branches, wards and stakes, including extinct categories such as dependent wards, dual-leader (president and bishop) branches, congregational stakes, regional bishoprics, and Apostolates.
• October 2024: We are renewing an effort to add local leaders, with links to other sites for biographical information. At the moment, it is almost all in early Utah.
• 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 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.