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.

Mapping Mormonism coverMormonPlaces 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

  • August 2026: I'm finishing up a project to revisit the reconstruction of the lost geography of the Council Bluffs area of Iowa during the Mormon era (1846-1853); as part of that, I have cleaned up a lot of information about the settlements and branches in that area, including revising several estimated locations.
  • January 2026: It's done! The fourth and final installment of This Branch of the Church: Maturing Practice(s), 1860-1877 is out, covering a period where most of Utah is using the familiar stake and ward system, but the rest is doing all kinds of stuff, until Brigham Young cleans it all up before his passing.
  • January 2026: In conjunction with the "This Branch" series, I have added the leaders for all of the congregations in Utah and other stakes (or stake-like things) prior to 1877—about 400 of them. This is a proof-of-concept for what it would take to do leaders for everywhere and everywhen, but I don't have the resources for that.
  • 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.
  • August 2025: One of our student research assistants did some great work this summer working through the history of the Eastern States Mission, adding or improving dozens of branches in the Mid-Atlantic U.S.
  • 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: BYU Studies has published the first installment of This Branch of the Church, a series of four articles based on MormonPlaces that evaluates the evolution of local congregations of the Church prior to 1877. Personally, I think it's a pretty surprising story.