Digitized Sources
The LDS Church History Library
“The Church History Library collects materials by or about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members. The collection consists of manuscripts, books, Church records, photographs, oral histories, patriarchal blessings, architectural drawings, pamphlets, newspapers, periodicals, maps, microform, and audiovisual materials.”
L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University
“Special Collections acquires, preserves, and makes available for use printed materials (280,000 books, pamphlets, prints, etc.) and a vast array of items comprising manuscript materials (8,000 manuscript collections including diaries, journals, papers, music scores, university records [including records of retired faculty], and 500,000 photographs).”
The Joseph Smith Papers Project
“The Joseph Smith Papers Project is an effort to gather together all extant Joseph Smith documents and to publish complete and accurate transcripts of those documents with both textual and contextual annotation. All such documents will be published electronically on this website, and a large number of the documents will also be published in print.”
The Journal of George Q. Canon
“The online publication of Cannon’s journal will eventually include roughly 2.5 million words and will open up new insight and understanding into the Mormon past. The journal, however, should not be seen just from the vantage point of Mormon history—it ranks as one of the most voluminous and valuable journals in American religious history.”
Utah Digital Newspapers Program
“Our collection holds over 1,000,000 pages of historic Utah newspapers and it grows monthly. Its newspapers can be browsed by issue or searched by keywords, article titles, weddings, deaths, and births. UDN is built upon a distributed state-wide collection of newspapers that is aggregated into a single, searchable index hosted at the U of U.”
USU Digital Collections: Historical Diaries
“The Historical Diaries digital collection brings a sampling of these firsthand accounts from the Merrill-Cazier Library’s Special Collections and Archives to your computer screen. More than just lists of daily reflections by Utah residents, these volumes also contain biographies and correspondence related to the individuals who wrote them.”
“About 90,000 Latter-day Saint converts crossed the oceans during the 19th century, heeding a call to come to Zion. The Mormon Migration website offers inspiring accounts of their journeys. The autobiographies, journals, diaries, reminiscences, images, and letters link to hundreds of known LDS immigrant voyages and provide a composite history of Mormon immigration to America.”
BYU Digital Collections: Mormon Missionary Diaries
“Beyond the daily cares and cycles of the lives of common people are insights into the economic and political worlds they inhabited. Poverty, inflation, population mobility, family and community structure, as well as religious attitudes are just a sample of the knowledge that can be gained through the study of these missionary journals.”
University of Utah Digital Collections: American Westward Migration
Includes a number of digitized Mormon diaries.
“Full transcription. Published in Iowa in 1853 by Washington Gladden Bishop, a prominent Mormon dissenter. The singular publication of Bishop’s Church of Jesus Christ of the New Jerusalem. See Saunders, “Francis Gladden Bishop and Gladdenism: A Study in the Culture of a Mormon Dissenter and His Movement” (MA thesis, Utah State University, 1989).”