This is the paper I read at the Church History Symposium in Provo earlier this month. Three cheers for genealogists!

From 1788 to 1961, my father’s ancestors lived in a small corner of western New York, in towns like Canandaigua and Palmyra. As a newly minted family historian in the 1980s, I benefitted from my non-Mormon ancestors’ proximity to the birthplace of Mormonism: those interested in Church history had gathered every imaginable record from that region, and I combed through them all. My family was not prominent, so there were no biographies or ready-made collections of papers, and I had to put their story together by digging out the details one at a time.

It wasn’t too difficult to find personal details about my grandfathers: They were small landowners and citizen soldiers, so their names appeared throughout local records. For example, because New York State took a census of farmers in 1845, 1855, 1865 and so on, I could get a sense of my grandfathers’ labor by noting how many acres had been cleared from one census to another, and how many bushels of wheat they grew, and how many horses they had to help them in their work.

It was much harder to discover anything at all personal about my grandmothers. Their names didn’t even appear in those agricultural censuses – what did they do? what was their labor like? And then, as I stared at those tabulations of carrots raised and honey gathered and sheep sheared, I suddenly realized that part of the answer to my question was right there, hidden in plain sight: Along with the potatoes and turnips and corn, the census recorded the pounds of butter and cheese made, the yards of flannel woven and woolen fabric fulled, the cows milked and the vegetable gardens tended. This was all women’s work. This is what my grandmothers and their daughters did – hidden under the name of husband and father, but waiting to be recognized and credited to the women of the family.

Once in possession of that secret, I looked for and discovered traces of my female ancestors everywhere.

This is a habit I brought with me when I moved on to Church history. There were a few obvious repositories of women’s stories – some diaries, a few correspondence collections of prominent women, the minutes of women’s auxiliaries. But most of LDS women’s history was, like the history of my family’s women, less obvious, hidden in plain sight but still hidden. But I had learned as a genealogist how to notice the traces of women, and uncover their lives.

The obvious sources of Mormon women’s history have been or are being mined by historians in the present and recent past. My purpose today is to suggest how we can move beyond those obvious sources, to find new stories about individual LDS women and then to consider what those individual lives can tell us about broader concepts in Mormon women’s history.

The secret is to think as much like a genealogist as a historian; to notice the women who appear in the records in even small ways; and to be willing to glean the details from numerous sources, to build the pictures of individual lives who can serve as representatives of larger issues in LDS women’s history.

For example, I first ran across Tsune Nachie in a paragraph in a Relief Society Magazine of the 1930s. She was an elderly Japanese widow living in Hawaii, working in the temple there. That wasn’t much, but she caught my notice as a named woman, and, when sometime later, I ran across another paragraph about her somewhere as a Sunday School worker, I remembered her name.

Still later, when I worked on a project on the early history of the Church in Japan, I ran into her again – she was a housekeeper in the mission home in Tokyo. At that point, I began actively searching for her as I read through every record I could find from that time and place: She appeared in brief mentions in the diaries and correspondence of missionaries. When instructions went out to those missionaries to gather for conferences, the notices included requests to let Sister Nachie know whether the elders would be present for meals. The programs for Christmas celebrations listed her participation in the form of talks. A mission report to Salt Lake City mentioned her as helping with the translation of the Book of Mormon. Once she moved to Hawaii to be near the temple, the usual genealogical sources of immigration records and census enumerations became available.

No single reference to Tsune Nachie was very prominent or told much of her personal story, but taken together, I could get a sense of how beloved she was to the missionary elders she looked after, and how tenacious she was in her self-appointed task of carrying the gospel to the Japanese people living in Hawaii. One detail gleaned here, and another picked up there, just the way family historians have to piece together the stories of female ancestors.

And how might the individual story of this one Japanese sister serve as a lens into broader questions of Church history? Well, depending on the interest of the particular historian:

Her story might be added to similar stories of early converts around the world to examine how local women, although not necessarily called formally to serve as missionaries, transmitted the gospel to their families and friends.

Because Sister Nachie was the first of her nation to enter the temple, and because she corresponded with and traveled to visit members in Japan to gather their records for temple work, her story could be used to examine the role of women in providing temple ordinances to those who could not themselves travel to temples – a very common occurrence before the rapid spread of temples in recent years – Sister Nachie’s story, in fact, parallels the story of a woman who performed the same service for German Saints in the same period.

Her story might also have something to say, to the right historian, about women’s gospel scholarship. She was one of several Japanese members who rotated the teaching of the adult Sunday School in Tokyo. No formal lessons had yet been translated into Japanese, so each teacher devised his or her own lessons. Most of the teachers were all over the map when it came to lesson topics – there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to their choices. But every time it was Sister Nachie’s turn to teach, she taught from the Book of Mormon, systematically working her way through the Book, from beginning to end. We don’t often think of Sunday School minutes as sources of women’s history – but women taught and attended Sunday School, so women appear in those minutes, so in the hands of the right historian, those minutes do become sources of women’s history.

You can train yourself to notice women, and therefore their stories, from the smallest of clues – because, of course, women are everywhere present in lived history, if not in written history. Sometimes it takes only the smallest of clues to start a researcher on the trail. One afternoon several years ago, I was manually cranking my way through a roll of microfilm of an early newspaper published at Beaver, Utah. I was on my way toward a specific date near the end of the reel, but as I paused in my cranking to get a better grip on the handle, I saw a phrase out of the corner of my eye: “Raised in the household of Brigham Young.” Because I’m a fan of Brigham Young, I read the brief article, the obituary of a young girl who had died by suicide, in a brothel in Butte, Montana. The article was a nasty one, blaming the downfall of the 18-year-old prostitute on the corruption of her early life among the Mormons.

Nonsense. I immediately dismissed the story as false – I had never heard of the girl, named Inez Maybert – Maybert was certainly not a common Utah surname, and obviously the reporter had an anti-Mormon agenda.

But the next day, unable to get the melancholy image of the desperate girl out of my mind, I turned to the first tool of genealogists, the federal census. There she was – Ina rather than Inez, living with Brigham Young’s wife Lucy Bigelow, in St. George. I began hunting for Ina, and in one eight-hour day of hunting, documented on my blog, I had uncovered the incredible story of three generations of Anglo-Indian Latter-day Saint women in Calcutta; the immigration and death of the grandmother, the raising of her grandchild by Lucy Bigelow Young, the rapid descent into the living hell of brothels in Salt Lake and Butte, and Ina’s desperate escape through an overdose of laudanum.

I was a history columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune at the time I uncovered Ina’s story, and I wrote about her for the paper. That column was picked up by an Indian news agency that distributed it world-wide to countries with large Indian emigrant populations. A few days after publication, a man in Australia, a descendant of the same Anglo-Indian family that had produced Ina, sent me a photograph of Ina’s mother – a Latter-day Saint woman of Calcutta, in the 1850s, an incredible document.

And how could Ina’s life possibly serve as a lens into Latter-day Saint women’s history beyond her own sad story? She can serve that purpose because Ina was a pawn in the battle between Mormon and non-Mormon in territorial Utah. A Protestant minister had had a role in alienating Ina from her foster family. Ina’s story played out in the Salt Lake newspapers, the Mormons blaming Protestant interference for Ina’s downfall, the non-Mormons asking what else you could expect of a woman raised in Mormon corruption. Ina could so easily serve as a case study in the battle over women and their bodies in Mormon history – but finding that case study was dependant on noticing her name in the first place, and then in applying genealogical research techniques to find her hiding in plain sight in so many easily accessible records.

Another place to watch for women hiding in plain sight is to read the papers of mission presidents, where we generally expect to find records of men’s activities. (Incidentally, I am drawing today on mission records because I am personally attracted to international history, but there are similar and more plentiful records of the stakes and wards where the same sorts of stories can be found.) Although the Church began calling “lady missionaries” in the late 1890s, sisters were still highly unusual in the early 20th century, so the papers of mission presidents naturally are more masculine than feminine. But sometimes you can get lucky and find women’s stories hiding among the men’s history.

Susie Becraft of Ogden was the first lady missionary called to serve in the Eastern States Mission, in 1901. At 24, she began her mission by calling on relatives in western New York State, then presented herself to her mission president in Brooklyn to become a regular proselyting missionary. Her mission president recorded, “Had I been consulted in relation to sending lady missionaries into this field I would have asked [Church officers] not to send any.” (It has been a lot of fun to gather the reactions of mission presidents to early sister missionaries – some, like this one in the Eastern States, would rather not have had them; others were enthusiastic and would gladly have taken more than were available. Those reactions in themselves would make an interesting women’s history story, and I understand Matt McBride is interested in all such responses – channel any you find to him, please.)

Susie Becraft arrived at the Brooklyn mission home without a companion having been called to assist her, and her housing caused some serious problems for her president. He didn’t feel she should live alone, and in order to accomplish any missionary work she would have to work closely with the elders. But how could she take a room where any of the elders lived? Such a thing would have caused gossip among both members and non-members – and in fact, no matter what the mission president tried, gossip did arise.

The president decided the best he could do was provide Susie with a room in the mission home. “Sister Becraft’s apartment is kept strictly private, and no familiarity is permitted,” he recorded.

But still, that wasn’t enough. One of the president’s counselors also lived at the mission home. That counselor was married (his wife remaining in Utah and not with the counselor in Brooklyn), and, the president wrote, “of all the elders in the mission [he] pays the least attention to women, and in fact seems to have no desire for their company unless his duty demands it.” So far, so good.

But the president traveled through the mission, often being absent from the mission home. For the sake of appearances, Susie went to live at an LDS woman’s boarding house whenever her president was absent. Not only was that inconvenient for her, it was expensive – it cost her $1.50 per day to live at the boarding house. On one occasion, that boarding house was not available, and the room Susie had found with another local LDS family suddenly became unavailable. “To meet the emergency,” wrote the president, “we called in another elder so that she and [my counselor] were not alone.” Nevertheless, local members who did not know anything other than that the president was out of town and Susie and the counselor were still at the mission home, reported to Salt Lake that the lady missionary was living alone with a man.

“I do not appreciate my position,” her president said, “but as she had been sent to the mission by those who were placed over me, I resolved to meet the situation and do the best I could.” He realized that she was not responsible for the awkward position her president was placed in. “She is a good, noble girl, full of faith, and thoroughly devoted to her mission, and she is blessed with good common sense, and has behaved very discretely with the elders and saints, but [I] will feel it quite a relief when she returns.”

Susie sprained her knee while working in Brooklyn, and could no longer do regular mission work. Nevertheless, she had been called as a missionary and wanted to serve, so her president found other work for her. “She is very apt at figures and neat with books, and has been quite a help in doing office work, and by having her do it she felt that she was doing some good.” Susie served a full year as a missionary, in addition to the time she spent visiting her family elsewhere, and was given an honorable release.

It takes a lot of reading to uncover such stories, and many historians may hesitate to use such sources – it is, after all, impossible to predict which mission presidents were good enough historians themselves to record the facts of women’s service in enough detail to be useful, or which stake presidents kept their files in order and eventually deposited them where historians can find them. The historian with a very narrow question might read such files for years without finding material that directly addresses that narrow question. But reading with a more open mind, tuning into anything about women, can be just as unpredictably fruitful. Here’s an analogy: I could stand here and toss a tennis ball into the audience. There is no way to predict which one of you I will hit – but I will certainly hit somebody. It’s the same way with searching these new sources for women’s history: There is no way to predict just what you will find – but you will certainly find something of value and interest.

That was certainly the case when I read through some miscellaneous files kept by a series of mission presidents in France. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, merely surveying for something. What I found among the largely unorganized files were records of the first Gleaner Girl program established in Europe. Gleaners, you might remember, were older teens and women in their early 20s, who participated in activities specifically designed to help them become leaders in their wards and branches. One of their activities was the construction of “Treasures of Truth” books – records of their own lives documenting their spiritual development.

Among these Gleaner records I found several essays written by a young Swiss woman named Louise Poinzyeux. She wrote about her mother’s conversion prior to Louise’s birth in 1917, a very early conversion for French-speaking Switzerland. She wrote about a time when she, Louise, had been healed of a dangerous illness. Altogether, these Gleaner records spoke not only of LDS women in the 1930s when the essays were written, but also of LDS women of a generation earlier, in a little-studied corner of the Church.

Something about the name Louise Poinzyeux kept nagging at the back of my mind. I had heard that name somewhere before – but where? Was it like the case with Tsune Nachie, where I had run across some small story that I needed to connect to these later discoveries? It took several days of wondering before I finally realized why I knew that name. “Louise Poinzyeux” was the maiden name of my then-97-year-old visiting teaching companion. I had made a living connection between Latter-day Saint women’s past and present. Louise had lost her Gleaner essays through 80 years of long-distance moves, but she still had her diaries – the record of multiple missions and decades of Church and family service, which I hope will one day be made available to historians of Latter-day Saint women’s history.

There is another source of women’s history I would like to suggest today, one that has not yet been widely exploited by historians. This is a source where there is some difficulty of access for most of us – but my purpose today is to suggest new sources, not deal with access.

Latter-day Saints today are asked not to write to general authorities with their questions about doctrine and history and the specifics of their own circumstances – instead, we are asked to work with our own local leaders. I am certain that one of the main reasons for that policy is that in the past, enormous numbers of Latter-day Saints wrote to favorite Church leaders, requiring many hours of their time every week to dictate personal responses to repetitive questions, and questions that, frankly, were sometimes just weird! It is from letters such as these that John A. Widtsoe chose his topics for his “Evidences and Reconciliations” columns in the Improvement Era. It is from letters such as these that Joseph Fielding Smith wrote his Answers to Gospel Questions.

Several of the general authorities who received such floods of written questions preserved that correspondence which exists now in huge numbers of archival boxes, each query from a Church member stapled neatly to the carbon copy of the elder’s response.

During my brief time working at the Church History Library, I was able to dip only superficially into such collections. My sense is that far more men than women wrote with their questions. But women did write, many of them. They wrote asking questions of gospel scholarship. They wrote to ask advice about their personal circumstances.

At some point, when problems of access can be overcome, the letters of women to their Church leaders will prove to be an almost unlimited source of 20th century LDS women’s history. Some of their letters will prove to be the germs of research into individual lives, like Tsune Nachie, and Ina Maybert, and Susie Becraft, whose lives will illuminate broader questions of women’s history. Other letters can be studied directly as women’s history, without needing to research the lives of the writers: These correspondence collections are rich with letters revealing the questions and attitudes of women toward birth control, the style of women’s temple clothing, and women’s attitudes toward civil rights, among other issues. Such collections are not labeled “women’s history,” but women are there, as we are everywhere throughout Mormon history.

Historians are sometimes wary, even disdainful, of genealogists. We approach family history in the Church, after all, as if everyone is capable of doing it, whether trained or talented or not. Standards can be low. Expectations can be too high, as when we pretend that all anyone has to do is push a few computer keys and print out an accurate, complete pedigree. Historians find genealogists too involved with the particular instead of with trends and issues and connections. Family historians are sometimes too willing to accept legend as fact, or to perpetuate overly rosy images of ancestors.

But historians can also learn much from genealogists – the good genealogists, the ones who are careful, who document their claims, who weigh the evidence skillfully, and most of all who use techniques and records that are largely unfamiliar to historians. History – Mormon history, Mormon women’s history – is much broader than a few notable leaders, those who left bodies of personal writings for us to study. Mormon women’s history includes the lives of all Latter-day Saint women, including those who did not leave personal writings, but who appear incidentally in the records of others, hiding in plain sight.

By using the techniques of genealogists – especially the genealogist’s patience and willingness to sift through mountains of paper or microfilm in search of the scattered traces of women’s lives, we can reconstruct those lives, women’s religious impulses, their contributions to the Church. With those new stories of women in times and places and filling roles that have not as yet become widely known, skillful historians can take over, using those lives to illuminate those trends and issues and connections that are so important to our understanding of our past. Almost any collection, then, becomes a new source for Mormon women’s history.

We’re there, hiding in plain sight.