Andrew Jenson - Church Historian

Church Historian

In 1886, Jenson became a part time employee of the LDS Church, receiving a small monthly allowance. His assignments included conducting interviews and gathering photographs, historic documents, and other documentation during a trip to historic church sites in the eastern United States. Jenson also gathered similar documents from various church stakes and missions throughout the church, which led to the writing of a manuscript history for each LDS Church ward and stake. Jenson was appointed as a full-time Assistant Church Historian in 1897. Along with John Jaques, Jenson was the Acting Church Historian from 1899 until the appointment of Anthon H. Lund as Church Historian in 1900. Jenson would continue on again as Assistant Church Historian until his death.

During his time in the Church Historian's office, Jenson was a prolific writer, presenting the history of the Latter-day Saints from an orthodox perspective. He was also a remarkable archivist of historical material and continued to collect records and diaries for the Church Historian's office.

Jenson compiled the four-volume Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, a church chronology and an early Latter-day Saint encyclopedia. He was also closely involved with the compilation of the Journal History of the Church, which has been described by Utah historiographer Gary Topping as ...an immense scrapbook compilation consisting of several hundred volumes of various historical records (in its later years mostly newspaper clippings) documenting Mormon history from the beginning of the church until well into the twentieth century. Jenson's contribution included its chronological organization and a running subject index on thousands of index cards. He also compiled the "Encyclopedic History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". Among the men he worked with in Church Historian's office was Joseph Fielding Smith, who later served as Church Historian and eventually as President of the Church.

During the 1890s, Jenson collected all the records he could find concerning the Mountain Meadows massacre. This archive including his own field notes, excerpts of witnesses' diaries, sworn affidavits, newspaper reports, and the transcriptions from the LDS Church's internal investigations. Many participants in the massacre were granted complete confidentiality for the contents of these interview transcriptions. Since Jenson's time, these files were closed to the public and were not available for use by historians. However, in August 2008, LDS historians Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard published Massacre at Mountain Meadows through Oxford University Press. A decade in the making, research for the book finally draws from the Jenson archive.