Eldred G. Smith · 1968 October General Conference · 1968-10-04
Transcribed from the official printed Conference Report of the One Hundred Thirty-eighth Semiannual (October 1968) General Conference, digitized by the Church History Library and hosted at the Internet Archive (item conferencereport1968sa), pp. 42-43. Reading order rebuilt from the item's DjVu OCR word coordinates (scripts/ingest/cr-reading-order.py). Never previously ingested into the vault; flagged missing by the 2026 heavyweight review of this conference (which had already recovered this address's closing paragraph, mistakenly still attached to the Evans file below, but not the body). President Joseph Fielding Smith's introduction identifies him as "Elder Eldred G. Smith, Patriarch to the Church," immediately followed by Elder Richard L. Evans. Running heads, page numbers, and leaf markers removed; de-hyphenated line breaks and reflowed paragraphs; printed editorial side-heads preserved as Markdown headings without altering wording.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review: in-context proofread against the heavyweight collation already on file; no additional wording changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Ingested from the conferencereport1968sa DjVu XML reading order (leaf 42-43) to fill a gap flagged in the prior heavyweight review pass (progress/reports/conference-reports/1968-10.md). That pass had already identified this address's closing paragraph ("their land." through "Amen.") as belonging to Eldred G. Smith rather than Richard L. Evans, but left it merged onto the front of the Evans file rather than splitting it into its own file; this pass completes the split, recovering Smith's full address (previously entirely missing except for that closing paragraph) into this new file and correcting 1968-10-evans-their-land-2-chron-714-is-there.md to contain only Evans's own address, which itself was also missing its true opening (see that file's updated fidelity_notes). Collated directly against the reconstructed page text; verbatim from opening to closing 'Amen' with only mechanical OCR/hyphenation cleanup, no paraphrase.
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.