About 20 years ago, I helped a Utah family uncover their Greek roots. This was a project I was reluctant to undertake – even the alphabet, much less the language, was unknown to me; at the time, at least, the Family History Library had exactly no records from Greece; and internet sources were in the bearskins-and-stone-knives stage compared to today’s internet. Due to divorce and adoption, my friend had been completely cut off from any awareness of his Greek family, and wasn’t even sure of the name of his grandfather, the Greek immigrant.

Yet it turned out to be a project filled end-to-end with miracles, like nothing else I have ever done. Most of that story is intensely personal to the family involved, and I have no right to tell it. But I can tell you this much: After about six weeks of work, starting from absolute bare ground, members of that family scattered all over North America came to Salt Lake to do temple work for about 200 of their family members.

Because I had no access to Greek records, everything I found was culled from American sources. It turns out that in the generations on each side of 1900, the men of this family – bearing an unusual name and coming from a single island – came to the U.S. to work for a year or two; they would return home for a year or two, then come back to the U.S. Over and over and over. Each time they passed through New York harbor, immigration forms recorded their personal identifying information, including the name/address/relationship of the nearest family member remaining in Greece, and the name/address/relationship of whatever person in the U.S. they were going to live with. I was able to put together family groups of these men through those immigration records, using city directories and, rarely, census records to confirm to a reasonable degree of certainty the relationships of these brothers and cousins, with the mothers, wives, and sisters they reported leaving behind in Greece.

During the time I worked on this project, my friend’s family often gathered at his in-laws’ home in Salt Lake to hear about progress. The in-laws had great interest and experience with researching their own family history and were almost as interested as my friend and his almost-adult children were. One of the stumbling blocks, I told them, was that while records very often indicated a person’s birth date, I had had to learn to ignore that information – virtually every time a man gave his birth date to some government official, he gave a different month and day, although the year would generally be about the same.

I can still hear the disgust in the voice of my friend’s father-in-law when he asked, “Why do they have to lie all the time? Why can’t they just tell the truth?” I could never make him understand, and I suspect that if you asked him today, he would be adamant that all Greeks are liars.

What I had learned, though, was that Greek culture seldom, if ever, used a date of birth as identifying information. What was celebrated in Greece was not the anniversary of your birth, but the Saint’s Day of the Greek Orthodox saint you had been named for. These immigrating men no doubt could have stated their Saint’s Day with certainty, but they didn’t remember their birthdays, and guessed or made up a date, which they didn’t remember the next time they were asked. They weren’t lying; they were merely as uncertain of the date as you would be if you were suddenly dropped into a culture that randomly asked you for the date of your christening or blessing and you hadn’t happened to have brought that certificate with you.

-oooOooo-

That story will tie into this one by the end of this post.

In the spring of 1858, President James Buchanan did what he should have done before dispatching an army to Utah: He sent two men, L.W. Powell, ex-governor of Kentucky, and Major Ben McCullough of Texas, as a peace commission, to find out what was really happening in Utah and to resolve difficulties and bring an end to the Utah War. This peace commission arrived in Utah in early June 1858 and various public meetings were held from Salt Lake City south to Provo, where Powell and McCullough explained the honorable intentions of the government and its army and listened to Mormon citizens air their grievances.

As much as possible, these speeches were recorded by stenographers. In at least one case when a verbatim record could not be made, detailed minutes and notes of the speeches were combined into a written summary, signed by both Brigham Young and the two peace commissioners – Brigham certifying that the statement was “correct as far as I can recollect at present,” and the two commissioners, significantly, attesting only that they had compared two copies of the statement, and that the one retained by Brigham Young was a “true copy” of the original which the commissioners retained.

In some cases, purportedly verbatim transcripts of addresses given at these hearings were retained in the Brigham Young papers; in other cases, transcripts of speeches were sent to the commissioners who rejected them as entirely inadequate. Major McCullough indignantly rejected one transcript:

With one or two slight exceptions there is not a single sentence correct. The remarks made by me were few and brief yet the larger portion of them are not contained in the report sent me. The misrepresentation that has been sent me after nineteen days had elapsed leads me to believe that the Reporter is totally incompetent, or intends to grossly misrepresent me.

The real kicker came in mid-July, when the Deseret News published remarks made by Governor Powell at one of these public meetings, held in Lehi on June 16. The two commissioners objected to that publication, saying they had not been granted the customary courtesy to review and correct – to “revise and extend” in current congressional parlance – their remarks before publication. The commissioners were so angry that the Utah War might well have rekindled at that point, had not the two men been so committed to carrying out the assignment given to them.

Powell and McCullough were not the only men who expected – demanded, usually received – the courtesy of reviewing and revising their remarks before publication, whether because reporters erred or because such revisions were widely accepted. Brigham Young and other Church leaders, throughout their service in the Utah years, at least, regularly revised the transcripts of their speeches before publication. Sometimes, no doubt, stenographers had misheard remarks, or hadn’t been able to keep up with the speaker. Most often, perhaps, the revisions corrected grammar, straightened out awkward wording, made oral remarks sound more formal before they were committed to paper. In some cases, I suspect that inflammatory remarks were removed, by Brigham himself or by his clerks, from public speeches, in accordance with John M. Bernhisel’s pleading that some things meant for the ears of the Saints should not be printed and delivered to unfriendly eyes in the East.

In that time, and not just in Utah but in the general culture, this practice was not considered deceitful. Printed records were not primarily intended to preserve an exact record of what had been spoken. Publication on paper was serious and formal: This is what would be preserved and would represent you in the future, and gentlemen – congressmen, peace commissioners, and sermonizers included – had the right to present themselves as well as possible, and not to have every slip of the tongue set forever in stone.

This polishing of the public record was as much an accepted part of 19th century American culture as not recalling your birth date was a normal fact of Greek culture. Men who revised their remarks, men who came up with a different date whenever they were asked for a birth date that to them was meaningless, were not liars. Something else was in play, something that knowledgeable historians allow for.

-oooOooo-

A small handful of participants in Mormon history-making is increasingly criticizing the great Mormon clerk George D. Watt – the man who almost single-handedly created the Mormon expectation of published Conference talks – accusing him of lying when it is discovered how greatly his original shorthand notes vary from his final published project.

I object to that characterization as vehemently as I can protest anything: It is wrong – it is bearing false witness – it betrays ignorance of 19th century culture and Mormon history – to call George D. Watt a liar over these differences between first and final drafts. Not only does this mislabeling betray a parochial misunderstanding of the past, it is bad scholarship in the sense that those making this charge really have no evidence of who directed the revisions: Did George D. Watt edit these talks because of his own incompetence or desire to misrepresent speakers? Or was it the speakers themselves who, exercising the expected gentlemanly prerogative, edited their own remarks? There are notes in the Brigham Young papers indicating that this or that speech is not yet ready to be delivered to the Deseret News for publication because the speaker has not yet had time to revise the text. Knowing that this was a common practice – at least, I know if, if it remains unknown to those who are so free with the label of “liar” – why would it be unreasonable to give George D. Watt – and other stenographers – the benefit of the doubt when there are discrepancies between first and final versions of any address?

Note the differences between drafts, certainly. But stop the name-calling.