Mormon Missionary Diaries

One of my favorite online tools is Mormon Missionary Diaries. Released in around 2004, it was a truly ambitious project. Not only did the project team transcribe hundreds of missionary journals, but they also scanned every page, including the covers, in color. They also made the scans search able. So if I think a person or place name was mistyped, it is a simple matter to locate the original writing and making my own judgement. Plus the transcriptions maintain the original pagination of the diary. It was a lot of effort.

The diaries are organized by mission region, and by missionary. The interface isn’t the fastest. So I usually skip to the printing version of the diary I want (found at the bottom of each diaries’ index) and save it to my hard drive. Then I can read, search and explore without the delay that comes mostly from working over the Internet.

Included in a section apart from the diaries themselves, is a biography on each diarist. Don’t hesitate to read through the biographies. Even after almost a year of researching the Cane Creek Massacre, I found new sources of information just by reading the biography of John H. Gibbs.
One note on searching; the diaries retain the original spelling of the diarists. So if you are looking for references to something specific, like “Tennessee”, recognize that not every young man from Utah knew how to spell it correctly.