A meticulous Latter-day Saint archivist and historian, whose work on Joseph Smith laid the groundwork for most modern scholarship on the church prophet, has died.
Dean Jessee died in his Murray home Dec. 31. He was 96.
“Dean was ahead of us all,” said Jeffrey Johnson, a former archivist for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “...His understanding of the historical sources is the basis of all current” scholarship on the Utah-based faith.
His work culminated in The Joseph Smith Papers, the first and only comprehensive compendium of those historical manuscripts produced by or under the direction of the 19th-century farmhand-turned-religious-leader.
“He, more than anyone, is responsible for conceiving” of the project, said Richard Bushman, author of “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling” and a former general editor of the 27-volume series, dubbed the “lunar mission” of Mormon historical research and completed in 2023.
The idea came to Jessee nearly 30 years before The Joseph Smith Papers project launched — decades also spent publishing manuscripts from the life of the faith’s founder. Setbacks arose. Help came and went. But the archivist and historian for the church never let the project grow cold. In the end, the effort of making these records available to the public accounted for close to half his life.
As a result of this commitment, said Sharlee Mullins Glenn, who worked as his research assistant in the 1980s, he “forever changed our understanding of Joseph Smith and church history.”
From Springville to postwar Germany
Born 1929, Jessee grew up the eldest of eight in Springville during the Great Depression and World War II.
He received a call to serve a mission in Germany in 1949 as part of the first cohort sent after the war.
“I was ill-prepared for the scene of desolation that greeted me,” Jessee said in a 2011 interview with Joseph Smith Papers archivist Robin Jensen. “Vast sections” of the city he was sent to were “still uninhabited rubble. Through it all, the members were salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people. They had experienced untold suffering from the war, yet they treated us like their own children.”
Upon return, Jessee married Margaret June Wood, a talented singer from Colorado, in 1953. Together they had nine children.
Around the time of his marriage, Jessee graduated from church-owned Brigham Young University in art and German, followed by a master’s in church history. His master’s thesis, focused on fundamentalist Mormons, created a stir within BYU and church leadership and evinced an unflinching commitment to the historical record, whatever story it might tell.
Laying the foundation for modern scholarship
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Dean Jessee, left, pictured with Joseph Smith Papers co-editors Richard L. Bushman, center, and Ronald K. Esplin.
When Jessee arrived at what was then called the Church Historian’s Office in 1964, he found a vast trove of documents from the faith’s founding that had been largely hidden from scholars and the public alike due partly to their lack of organization.
“When I started,” he said in the same 2011 interview, “the prevailing philosophy was that the Historian’s Office was a private, unique repository founded upon revelation” and thus “it was not necessary to follow procedures developed elsewhere.”
For eight years, his days were consumed with little besides identifying and cataloging original manuscripts. That work included transcribing and publishing additional accounts of Joseph Smith’s boyhood “First Vision,” among other pivotal documents.
It was also around this point that Jessee encountered the inspiration for the Joseph Smith Papers project, according to the undertaking’s general editor, Ron Esplin.
“Exploring history books on the shelves of the University of Utah library in 1970, he stumbled on a shelf full of…the letters and papers” of Thomas Jefferson, Esplin said. “Pondering that marvelous collection of history sparked a vision: Joseph Smith, founding prophet of the Latter-day Saints — whose documents he knew and studied — deserved something like that.”
The ‘authoritative source’ on Joseph Smith
(Church History Library) Dean Jesse, right, and former official Church Historian Leonard Arrington in 1986.
The work accelerated after the appointment of Leonard Arrington as church historian, the first professional of the field to take up the mantle. The day was, as Jessee said in the 2011 interview with Jensen, a “defining moment” in his life.
Arrington established something of an elite task force of editors and historians under a newly established “History Division” and put Jessee on it. The assignment was “a dream come true” for the young archivist. Together he and his colleagues worked to publish more rigorous scholarship than the church had produced at any point previously.
During this time Jessee began systematically organizing Smith’s writings for public-facing publication, a project that would — although he did not know it at the time — continue for the next roughly half-century and efforts far beyond his own.
“For decades, when asked what he was working on, Jessee replied simply, ‘Joseph,’” Matt Grow, managing director of the Church History Department, said. “His vision and steadfast leadership meant that one man working on Joseph became an expansive project involving dozens.”
Today, the series is “widely accepted,” Grow said, as the “authoritative source” on Smith and the early church.
Critical to its success was Jessee’s rare ability to think in the granular and the grand.
“His care and precision in editing the church’s most significant documents is an inestimable contribution,” Jill Mulvay Derr, a former senior researcher in the Church History Department, said. “Dean had an unusual capacity for focus and concentration and a mind for detail.”
He combined this, Richard Bushman said, with “broad conceptions of how to organize a very large undertaking.”
Guiding this work was a simple belief that Smith was who he said he was, a testimony Jessee maintained was only strengthened by his scholarship.
“The more I have seen of this material,” Jessee said in 2011, “the more convinced I am of his veracity.”
A public viewing will be held Friday, Jan. 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Jenkins-Soffe Mortuary in Murray, and Jan. 10 from 10 to 10:45 a.m. at the Chevy Chase Ward, 5235 S. Wesley Road in Murray. The funeral service will follow at 11 a.m.