I spent a good part of last fall and winter reading through my maternal grandmother’s journals. She loved to write and keeping a journal was perhaps one of the great passions of her life. I enjoyed getting to see an inside perspective of her time on this earth, and I definitely feel like I know her better, but ultimately my agenda was to find more information about the Joseph Smith photo she passed onto me. I must say that in regard to the photograph she spoke only a few times, and her references were the same. She spoke of it being copied off the original tintype of the Joseph. In all fairness, she would have not known the difference between a tintype and a daguerreotype photo so the meaning is the same to me. At one point in the early 1990’s she wrote of her new husband, an amateur artist, working on a painting from the photo. They were serving a couple’s mission in California at the time and during that time she passed out photocopied images of his artwork, as well as photocopies of her scrapbook page that included news clippings and the small unedited Joseph Smith photo. As for the painting done by her husband, it was passed onto his family after his death and while I remember seeing the painting, I can only find a picture of it in the background of a photo of them from around 2002.
I was really hoping that I would find information in her journals from her first mission in Texas in the late 1960’s, but there are blocks of time missing, and I know that some of her precious journals were unfortunately damaged and disposed of due to extensive moisture and mold a couple of years ago. I have found a couple leads to investigate, and I still need to follow them through as well as developing a couple possible theories but nothing has been resolved in that regards.
So what’s happening now? We are hoping to do sort of a round-table with various experts in the field as well as representatives from the LDS Church. This has been in the making for the last eight months but schedules have been busy and who really wants to head to Salt Lake in the winter time. LOL There has been talk about possible doing it in a couple of weeks, but we will see if things can be lined up. I’ll let you know.
