Conference record · 1874 April General Conference · 1874-04-06
The Historical General Conferences (Weebly) page for this conference does not exist (1874-april.html and variants all return 404, reconfirmed 2026-07-01) — a genuine gap in that site's coverage, not a vault problem. The Deseret News for April/May 1874 (Utah Digital Newspapers) is the primary source for the day-by-day minutes. Source for the discourses themselves: Journal of Discourses, Volume 17. This conference opened April 6, 1874 and adjourned to reconvene May 7-9. All 7 discourses with surviving JD full text are filed separately as talks: Orson Pratt's 'The Kingdom not Organized by Man...' (April 6, JD 17); and, from the May continuation, Brigham Young's 'The United Order...,' George A. Smith's 'Zion to Be Redeemed...,' and John Taylor's 'The Position the Saints Have Occupied...' (May 7); Wilford Woodruff's 'Union is Strength...' and Erastus Snow's 'The United Order of Zion...' (May 8); and George A. Smith's 'The Blessings of Eternal Life...' (May 9, the conference's final discourse) — all 7 confirmed via direct collation against the IA OCR scan of JD Volume 17 (no Weebly bibliography exists to cross-check against). Session/time-of-day breakdown (AM/PM) could not be confirmed for the May sessions without an agenda source; talk order was inferred from the discourses' own sequential page numbers in JD.
Primary source for the conference minutes; not yet directly consulted for this pass, which focused on verifying the discourse texts against JD.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; fixed a major stale-claims bug (this file wrongly asserted no verbatim JD sermon texts had been located, when 7 discourses were already filed as separate talks).
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: fixed a stale-claims bug — this file asserted 'No verbatim JD sermon texts have been located for this conference,' when all 7 discourses already existed as separately filed talks with precise JD Volume 17 citations (reviewed under claude-sonnet-4-6's earlier light pass). Reconfirmed the Weebly 404 (tried 1874-april.html, 1874-april-may.html, 1874-may.html, all 404) — a genuine site-coverage gap for this year, not a vault problem; relied on direct IA OCR verification of JD Volume 17 instead. Rewrote the summary to name and cross-link all 7 filed discourses by date. Confirmed fidelity: fragmentary remains correct per schema/schema.md for record_type: conference_record.
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.