Conference record · 1847 April General Conference · 1847-04-06
Preferred witness is the CHL manuscript for this conference (Historian's Office general Church minutes, 1839-1877, '1847 March-April' / 'General Conference minutes, Winter Quarters,' CR 100 318, 4 leaves, recorded by Thomas Bullock). The four manuscript images were reconstructed from the CHL DZI image tiles and read directly in a follow-up transcription pass. The minutes are fragmentary and difficult: some words are faint, show-through is heavy, and several passages are summarized notes rather than full discourse text. Bracketed readings below preserve uncertainty rather than smoothing the transcript. Graded fragmentary because this is a minutes record and summarized discourse report, not a verbatim transcript.
Catalog description: 'General Conference. Speakers were Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Erastus Snow, John Smith, Orson Pratt, and Newel K. Whitney. Recorded by Thomas Bullock.' All four CHL leaf images were reconstructed from DZI tiles and transcribed conservatively; bracketed words mark unresolved readings.
OCR'd from churchchronology00jensrich_djvu.txt, lines ~516-521. Jenson states that John Smith (uncle of Joseph Smith, Sen.) 'had been sustained as a "Patriarch in the Church" as early as the general conference, held at Winter Quarters, April 6, 1847.' Retained as a secondary corroborating source now that the CHL manuscript is the preferred witness; the manuscript's John Smith speaking role (per its catalog description) is consistent with this sustaining.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review (original pass): in-context proofread; no artifacts found in the short file that existed at that time.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: located and opened the CHL manuscript (only 4 leaves; no restriction level shown in the catalog viewer). Follow-up transcription pass reconstructed all four CHL DZI leaf images and replaced the earlier leaf-1-only draft with a conservative image-based transcription. Remaining bracketed readings are source/handwriting uncertainty, not omitted leaves.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.