“That Which Was Lost”:

Recovering the Memories and Voices of Black Latter-day Saints

Ardis E. Parshall

Mormon History Association

7 June 2019

Salt Lake City, Utah

Proposal: Despite its zealous creation and preservation of historical records, one detail never officially tracked by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been the race of its members. Historians have known that black converts like Elijah Abel and Jane Manning James have participated in the Church from its earliest days, and the existence of black Mormons through later decades has been confirmed whenever such members were denied full participation in priesthood and temple. But how to identify individual black Mormons? how to find their voices, their contributions, their presence in records that do not specify race?

I will narrate the methods used by historians with the Century of Black Mormons project, reporting how we have identified the individuals featured in our database, through following clues buried in instances of discrimination and bigotry, through careful coordination of church records with civil records, and through the firm yet muffled voices of black Mormons themselves. Case studies will explore four broad classifications of research: Strict standards for documenting the lives of those who, like Abel and James, are generally known but about whom some legends have been accepted as fact; untangling and documenting the lives of enslaved men and women brought to Utah; identifying and documenting the lives of black Mormons who have never been known to our history before this project; and the response of living people who want to be sure that appropriate honor is paid to their black ancestors or friends.

While this paper focuses on a specific project, I include suggestions and techniques that will be useful to many Mormon history research projects that have no obvious record sources in the archives.

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The membership records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have evolved from informal lists, to handwritten ledgers, to individual paper documents, to electronic databases. In all those records, from many times and many places, I have yet to see a formal Church record requesting an indication of a person’s race.

In the absence of such recorded designations, then, how has the Century of Black Mormons team gone about identifying black Mormons for inclusion in our database? I’m proud of the techniques we’ve developed, and I hope they will give you some ideas for your own research, even when your topic may be far removed from race.

In some cases, black Latter-day Saints were already well known: There was no need for us to “discover” Elijah Able, a priesthood holder ordained in the earliest days of the Church,

or Jane Manning James, an early convert who is the subject of Quincy Newell’s new biography, and the major figure in the movie many of us will see during this conference, Jane and Emma. The labor there was not in identifying the people, but in gathering primary source material and in verifying the details of their Church membership, and in stripping away legends that had grown up around them.

Another group of early black Latter-day Saints was familiar to historians, but not well documented. These included enslaved men and women brought to Utah by Southern converts to Mormonism. Were these men and women, brought to Utah against their will, bona fide members of the Church? Tonya Reiter, who counts some of those enslaved people among her ancestors, has taken the lead in untangling those family lines and documenting dozens of people through professional genealogical techniques that are more or less identical to genealogical research for any group – with the added difficulty that too often African Americans have been omitted from the common records that white Americans take for granted when they trace their family history.

A third group of black Mormons has been discovered through what I think of as “dumb luck,” although a kinder description might be “through scholarly preparation, or keen observation.” I count among this class the discovery of three black sailors aboard the Mormon immigrant ship the Internationale, in 1853. I do not remember now why I happened to have pulled up the record of the Internationale’s crossing – it certainly had nothing to do with the Century of Black Mormons, because I do recall how startled I was to find that among the ship’s crew who were baptized in a vat on the deck of the ship were three unnamed men referred to as “Negro.”

Another instance of recovering the life of a black Latter-day Saint deserves a far more respectful descriptor than “dumb luck,” but I mention it here because it came about not through the brilliance of our research but through an agency that was out of our control: After the database had gone live, Paul Reeve was contacted by descendants of a man named Nelson Holder Ritchie. Their ancestor was a black man, they told Paul, something that had been more or less concealed throughout the 20th century when Nelson’s descendants were being ordained to the priesthood and marrying in the temple, but now they wanted their ancestor to be known and remembered by inclusion in the Century of Black Mormons. They had already done a great deal of research, which Paul was able to help them arrange and supplement through his own work, and so Nelson Holder Ritchie, a black Saint whom we had not discovered ourselves, is remembered in the database.

Now I want to walk you through a case study that illustrates many of the techniques that have so far proved useful to the project:

Beyond the hard work and detailed research that is common to all good scholarly projects, we quickly noticed one frequent factor in identifying previously forgotten black Mormons: Watch for signs of racism, both subtle and blatant. As a people, we have never been delicate about distinguishing between white and black, even when, officially, there was no requirement for the discrimination.

While going through membership records to document the baptism of an early member of our project, Paul noticed that “colored man” and “colored woman” had been written next to the names of one black family, and he wondered if other clerks had done the same thing. Indeed they had. Between the two of us, we scrolled through thousands of pages of membership records – beginning with the Southern States, but it’s important to note that clerks elsewhere in the United States made the same notation. That bit of racism, intended to put some church members into an undesirable lower class, served all these years later to make those Saints stand out in a positive way, newly recognized black Mormons to be remembered for their difficult religious choice.

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Sometimes the racism was more direct. A Christmas Eve letter in 1909 carries these lines:

We have three families of colored people, all of whom have been in the church eight or ten years, – one family in Minneapolis, Minn., one in Oshkosh, Wis., and one in South Bend, Ind. They have been good faithful people but so much in evidence in our meetings, that investigators have been kept away from our services, so with this lesson before us we have done no work among the colored people for at least seven years.

Although the letter did not name these “colored people” whose presence kept away desirable investigators, this was an obvious indication that we should look for black Mormons in the congregations of these three cities.

It was easy to identify Elijah A. Banks of Minneapolis – an earlier mission president had once responded to a complaint that a white woman had married a black man named Banks, in which he told the writer, in effect, to mind his own business, that we “do not consider this any bar to their being proper candidates for admittance into the fold of Christ. God is no respecter of persons and is as anxious to save the souls of our black brethren as he is of the white.” Minneapolis branch records of the early 20th century revealed that Elijah A. Banks, born enslaved in Tennessee, was a faithful participant in the branch.

Now I have to tell a story on myself. Years before the Century of Black Mormons was begun, I had featured this 1903 picture of the Minneapolis congregation on my Mormon history blog. But I had not see then what was right there in the photo for me to see … There, in the upper right corner, so obvious to me now, is the unmistakable face of Elijah A. Banks.

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Oshkosh, Wisconsin was another of the locations mentioned in that letter where we had reason to suspect we would find a black Mormon. The letter had been written in the last days of 1909; the 1910 census of the U.S. population was taken about four months later. Membership records indicated who was a Mormon, but not that Mormon’s race; the census recorded the race of each person listed, but of course made no mention of religion. Was it possible that we could combine the two sets of records to solve our puzzle? In fact it was possible. Searching the 1910 census for the names of every member in the mission records connected to Oshkosh, it didn’t take Paul very long to zero in on the family of Richard and Esther “Nettie” Kirchhoff and their two sons. The census recorded Nettie as “mulatto,” married to a white German immigrant. Nettie and her two sons were eligible for inclusion in the Century of Black Mormons.

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Meanwhile, I was doing – or attempting to do – the same thing to find the suspected presence of a black Mormon in South Bend, Indiana. I searched the membership records of the Northern Indiana Conference for the period surrounding 1909. There weren’t many names to search. and the census indicated that they were all white. So I left the records of baptized members and scanned through the lists of marriages and blessings and deaths. I did find the 1902 baby blessing of Chester Hood, whom the 1910 census indicated was black, but I could find no mention of his parents in the Indiana membership records. At that time, Mormon missionaries frequently blessed the children of non-Mormon parents, and that could easily have been the case with Chester Hood – and Paul, being a stickler for evidence that black Mormons were in fact both black and Mormon, I couldn’t take it for granted that the Hoods were those black faces in the South Bend Branch.

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So I resorted to learning as much as I could about the Hoods, using standard genealogical methods not related to church membership. I found they were part of a large clan who had settled in Cass County, Michigan, long before the Civil War, setting up a community of free black families. South Bend, Indiana, where the Hood infant was blessed, was only about ten miles from the Indiana/Michigan state line – but the baptisms of any Mormons there would have been recorded in an entirely separate set of church books. So I searched the membership records of the Michigan Conference, and quickly found the baptism records of that infant’s parents, George and Edna Hood. What’s more, I found the baptism record of that infant’s grandmother, Frances Stewart Hood – we now had evidence of three generations of a black family who were members of the Church early in the 20th century.

I continued to learn about Frances Hood and her Mormon descendants through typical genealogical sources – research of the kind that would have allowed me to write an adequate, if impersonal, account of their lives for our database. But remember that element of dumb luck that I said sometimes plays a role in our research? It reared its beautiful head not once, but twice, in the case of Frances Hood.

During the week that I was researching Frances’s life, I continued work on other, unrelated projects. One of those projects was my massive compilation of historic Mormon correspondence. For a few years around the turn of the 20th century, the Deseret News published a weekly page of missionary letters Typing merrily away one day, I unexpectedly came face to face with the Hoods in a letter from the missionary who baptized them. He recounted a dream that had converted George Hood to the gospel, then he described their baptism:



At 11 a.m., over 300 people, with about 100 vehicles, met at a selected spot on the bank of the Christian creek, and listened with interest to an open-air service, which consisted of singing, “O, My Father,” prayer, and a discussion on the first principles of the Gospel … In solemn silence … stepped forward Mr. George Hood, wife and mother, and were immersed in the pure stream …

The missionary’s letter doesn’t mention the race of the Hood family. Had I transcribed that letter even a single week earlier, I would not have known it had any reference to black Mormons, and, given the volume of typing I do every week, I think it impossible that I would have remembered George Hood when I next ran across him as the father of the infant blessed in Indiana. Dumb luck.

During the same week, in yet another unrelated project, I was paging through issues of Liahona: The Elder’s Journal, the old church missionary magazine, looking for material that might be useful for my blog. In 1907 and 1908, that magazine published the very short testimonies of Latter-day Saints in the missions of the United States. There are hundreds of these testimonies, page after page, each page looking at first glance like every such other page. But on this page, my eye fell on the names of Frances and George Hood. I had found the voice of a black Mormon woman from more than a century earlier, testifying to her faith. Again, had I been surveying the Liahona a week earlier, I would not have known Frances’s name. Even on the very day I found these lines, had I blinked as I scrolled through the pages I would have missed it. Dumb luck again.

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Once we have identified a new-to-us black Mormon, we always check the Family Search database. Often that database cannot tell us anything we don’t already know, because often the only record there for our black Mormons was taken from the very membership record that helped us find such members in the first place. But the case of Frances Hood illustrates the value of checking Family Search anyway.

First, at some point in the 20th century the Church established the practice of completing temple ordinances for all Latter-day Saints who died before visiting a temple themselves. In a few cases, that has led us to the discovery – one that pleases us perhaps more than it ought to – that some black Mormons received temple ordinances before 1978 – they were barred from the temples in life, but in death that absence of racial designation on their records allowed them access to the temples posthumously.

In Frances’s case, I discovered that someone had mistaken her gender. Not only had Frances received temple ordinances before the racial restriction was lifted – she had also been ordained to the priesthood! (A member of the Family Search staff helped me straighten out those records in a way that allowed us to preserve the record of Frances’s original baptism – something we think is important because it makes visible the religious choice that Frances made during her own lifetime.)

Family Search proved most useful in Frances’s case in another way: While few Family Search records of black Mormons – other than the famous cases like Elijah Able and Jane Manning James – show any evidence of current family involvement, a look at the records for Frances’s extended family suggested that she still had Mormon relatives: Someone had done a little work cleaning up errors in the genealogical data. Because Family Search allows you to send messages to those who have made such efforts, I contacted one such contributor. The response came from a woman very excited to talk about the family. Her husband was a descendant of one of Frances’s brothers, and he had joined the Church without any idea that a long-ago aunt had ever been a Mormon. She and her husband wanted to help, and were enthusiastic about Frances being a part of the Century of Black Mormons database, but they did not know more than I had already learned about their family history. They had been in touch with a distant cousin, though, who still lived in the old family area, and they were sure she would know things.

The next I heard from them was written in a much more subdued tone. That distant cousin, they said, had “opinions” about Mormons; she denied us permission to reproduce a family-owned image; she wanted nothing to do with us or our project. That seemed to be the end of that trail.

But a few days later, at 4:24 in the morning, that frosty woman with the “opinions” sent me a brief email: “A cousin … contacted me about your project … Please tell me more about it.”

So I did. I explained the who’s and where’s and what’s. I told her Century of Black Mormons is a secular project hosted at the University of Utah, and that it was not directed in any way by the LDS church. I summarized my findings to date and offered her scans of every record found. I told her that our intention was “to honor the memory of people who made a religious choice that wasn’t always the easiest one they could have made. We are working to tell their stories with respect and with accuracy.”

Twenty-four minutes later, her response came: “This is fascinating … I would very much like to be a part of this project.”

This woman was able to verify many of the facts already found, and with her intimate knowledge of local history and geography she corrected a few of my drafted statements. And she sent me a family picture. Before I show it, I want to stress that this is not an image of Frances Stewart Hood – the family is not aware of any such image. It is the photograph of Frances’s sister Sarah, who was not a Mormon. But to whatever degree there is a family resemblance between sisters, this is as close as we come to recovering the image of our pioneering black sister from Michigan – shared with us only through the goodwill of non-Mormon family members.

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The research for every individual in the Century of Black Mormons takes its own course. In summary, some of the tools for identifying previously unknown black Mormons typically include:

1. Being alert to signs of racism: Whether it is a single overt act, or whether it is a systemic discrimination like flagging membership records with the word “colored,” recognizing this racism is often the first indication that a black man or woman has defied bigotry to follow religious conviction.

2. Good genealogical research practices. I haven’t detailed the genealogical work involved because it involves the same sorts of research that solves family history problems of all kinds.

3. Unpredictable and largely unexplainable circumstances. Whether you call it dumb luck as I have done here, or coincidence, or – if this were a devotional context rather than a scholarly one, some of us would offer a decidedly more otherworldly cause – we are often more successful when we accept that we are not fully in control of our own research.

and 4. Seeking out others with a shared interest in some aspect of our work. Courtesy, respect, openness, and a willingness to learn from those who are less credentialed or scholarly than we think is ideal, can bring allies in unexpected places.

The Century of Black Mormons project is unlike any I have ever worked on before. It is a project that calls for every bit of experience or native talent I can muster. And yet, after whatever I can offer, the result does not belong to me. No matter how trite it sounds, it is an honor to restore to memory the names and life choices of some of the most faithful men and women I have ever studied. I respond to their life stories because of what they and I share as Mormons. I know I cannot fully appreciate their choices because I do not know their lives as black men and black women. What we can do through research will be made incalculably more valuable as members of the black community add an understanding that I can only support through basic research.