Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards · 1851 September General Conference · 1851-09-22
Official epistle from the First Presidency dated September 22, 1851, published in the Deseret News on November 15, 1851, p. 2. This is the authoritative text as published; the epistle was issued in connection with the September 1851 Semi-Annual Conference.
Digital transcript of the original Deseret News publication. Original newspaper available at BYU ContentDM (desnews1:170571).
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: the original Deseret News, Nov 15, 1851 issue (BYU ContentDM desnews1:170571) could not be opened directly to upgrade source_url beyond the weebly transcript; newspapers.lib.utah.edu returns HTTP 418 to automated fetch (tooling limitation, consistent with prior JD-era reviews). Body independently re-fetched and corroborated against historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com: opening sentence, the full Sept 7-10 conference-proceedings paragraph (traveling bishops, poor-fund agents, mission calls, Word of Wisdom vote, tithing vote), signers, and the Sept 22, 1851 closing date all match verbatim. No missing text, no boundary issues, no OCR errors found requiring fixes. Speaker/date/session metadata confirmed correct. Follow-up correction: the id/filename and conference field had been left as '1851-10'/'1851 October General Conference' despite the body's own text and this file's date field (1851-09-22) both confirming the conference was held September 7-10, 1851 (per the outlier record in indexes/conference-outliers.yaml, 'not October'). This mismatch had caused the generated progress tracker to show a phantom, already-complete '1851 October' row alongside an empty, still-claimed '1851 September' row for the same conference. Renamed id/filename to the 1851-09 prefix and corrected conference to '1851 September General Conference' to match; no body text changed. 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.