Showing results by author "C.M. Rick"
Biography of Joseph Smith as written by his mother, Lucy Mack Smith. Shortly following the death of Joseph Smith in 1844, and into 1845, Lucy Mack Smith dictated her recollections and family story to Nauvoo schoolteacher Martha Jane Coray. Coray worked with her husband to compile these books of notes and other sources into a manuscript, which was then copied. Although surrounded by a great deal of controversy when first published by Orson Pratt in 1853, it was later published by the Church under the direction of Joseph F. Smith. It has been called "one of the essential sources for Mormon origins" by Richard L. Anderson, and in the words of Leonard Arrington it "perhaps tells more about Mormon origins than any other single source."