Exactly What You Are Looking For

Levi Richards, 1799-1876

I had an experience at work earlier this week that I thought was instructive.  I was assigned to look for some information about Joseph Smith's Letter to Oliver Granger on July 23, 1840.  Specifically I was supposed to focus on the Prophet's statement that he had received a letter from Granger and from Brother Richards from New York on June 23, 1840.  If you follow the link, you will see that the website identifies Brother Richards as Willard Richards, certainly the most prominent member of the Richards family at the time.  But the problem with this is that Willard Richards was in England on a mission in 1840.  And so my assignment was to find out which member of the Richards family had been with Oliver Granger in New York in June 1840.

These kinds of historical research quests are often both fun and maddening at the same time for me.  They are fun because they take me through all different kinds of sources.  They are maddening because often--and perhaps even usually--no one bothered to record a detail that minute, meaning that the best that you can usually hope for is to make an educated guess.

Hopefully this won't bore you, but I thought I'd give an abbreviated recap of the process I went through in looking for this small detail in the sources available.  First I had to identify any potential early brethren with the last name of Richards who would have been in the Church around 1840, and may have been in the vicinity of New York.  This left me with a list of 4 or 5 potential candidates.  Then I had to look for anything I could find on them, letters, diaries, etc.  The problem was that for the most part the letters and diaries of these various Brother Richardses did not begin until 1841.  Hoping that these things were misdated, I went through them anyway, but without any luck.  I found a lot of interesting details looking through these items, but not the detail that I was looking for.  But this process did help me to narrow my list of potential people down to Phineas Richards, Levi Richards, and Samuel Richards (all members of the same family).

I was just about ready to inform my boss that the best we could do was to narrow the possibilities down to these three, until I realized that perhaps I had been looking in the wrong sources.  I had concentrated on diaries and letters written by these brothers, thinking that there might be one mentioning or written from New York.  But it hit me that often the person directly involved is the worst record keeper of what happened, while family members often care much more about those small details.  With this premise in mind, I began looking through the diaries and letters of Rhoda Richards (a sister to Phineas, Levi, and Willard, and an aunt to Samuel).  And there it was in a letter from Rhoda Richards to Willard Richards on July 5, 1840, "Brother I now inform you of the safe arrival of Brother Levi to this place [Richmond, Massachusetts] the last day of June.  We truly rejoiced to see him. . . . Brother Levi spent a week in New York with Brother Granger" (Rhoda Richards to Willard Richards, June 14-July 5, 1840, Richards Family Papers, MS 1558, box 1, folder 2, CHL).

Ok, so for the 1 person who may still be reading this, why have I bored you with this story about my research?  As I've mentioned, these are rare moments for a historian.  Generally, the best that you can do is still guess work.  You study, you compile your notes, and you put together the best argument you can make, but in the end if you are honest with yourself, you still aren't sure whether you are right or not.  But every now and again, you get lucky and you find that golden letter or diary entry or whatever that throws uncertainty out of the window.  You don't need to make arguments or compile pages of evidence to support those arguments (as fun as that can occasionally be).  All you have to do is point to that one simple letter and everything becomes clear.  In other words, sometimes you do find exactly what you are looking for.  Moments like this give me hope, and not just as a historian.  They give me hope that from time to time, we find exactly what we are looking for.  From time to time, we don't have to make our case or convince anyone or ourselves, because the evidence is clear.

Brett