First Presidency · 1851 April General Conference · 1851-04-07
Official written epistle from the First Presidency published in the Deseret News.
Official published text of the Fifth General Epistle.
Digital transcript of the epistle.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review: in-context proofread, encoding-artifact cleanup, synopsis/session-artifact cleanup, and spacing fixes. NOT a full page-by-page scan collation.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: no official online or JSP text exists for an 1851 Deseret News item, so the verified Utah Digital Newspapers (Deseret News, April 7/16, 1851) source is retained as source_url; newspapers.lib.utah.edu returns HTTP 418 to automated fetch, so a deep item-level link could not be programmatically verified (tooling limitation, consistent with prior JD-era reviews). Body independently corroborated against the historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com secondary transcript witness: opening sentence, both addenda sections (sugar/molasses/beet and bee-keeping), signers (Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards), and both dates (April 7 and April 16, 1851) all match. No missing text, no boundary issues, no OCR errors found requiring fixes. Speaker/title/date/session metadata confirmed correct. Metadata repair (Samuel Baird): added session: 'Whole Conference' -- consistent with the convention already applied to conference_record files in this era, since a First Presidency General Epistle is a published document covering the whole conference rather than remarks delivered in one specific meeting session.
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.