Minutes, 7–11 April 1841
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Source Note
General Conference of the Church, Minutes, , Hancock Co., IL, 7–11 Apr. 1841. Featured version published in “Minutes of the General Conference of the Church,” Times and Seasons, 15 Apr. 1841, vol. 2, no. 12, 386–388. For more complete source information, see the source note for Letter to Isaac Galland, 22 Mar. 1839.
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Historical Introduction
From Wednesday, 7 April, through Sunday, 11 April 1841, JS presided over a general of the in , Illinois. The conference convened the day after a celebration commemorating the eleventh anniversary of the founding of the church. This 6 April celebration, which featured the laying of the cornerstones of the Nauvoo and a parade of the , was attended by thousands of men and women. While some members of the church considered the cornerstone ceremony to be part of the conference itself, the business portion of the conference began at ten o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, 7 April 1841, as the minutes featured here attest.Due to inclement weather Friday through Sunday, most of the conference took place Wednesday and Thursday. During the conference, was added as an assistant president in the to relieve the ailing , and was unanimously selected, or sustained, to replace the deceased in the . In addition, sermons on the recently revealed doctrine of for the dead were delivered at the conference, along with instructions related to building the temple., the clerk for the conference, presumably took rough minutes during the meeting and later prepared them for publication. No original minutes are extant, but a polished version of the minutes was published in the 15 April 1841 issue of the Times and Seasons.
Footnotes
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1
See Benediction, 6 Apr. 1841. A newspaper from nearby Warsaw, Illinois, reported that the anniversary celebration was attended by “about 7000 or 8000, some say as high as 12,000.” The church’s newspaper reported that there were “probably not less than ten thousand persons present.” (“The Mormons,” Western World [Warsaw, IL], 7 Apr. 1841, [3]; “Celebration of the Aniversary of the Church,” Times and Seasons, 15 Apr. 1841, 2:376.)
Western World. Warsaw, IL. 1840–1841.
Times and Seasons. Commerce/Nauvoo, IL. Nov. 1839–Feb. 1846.
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2
See Historical Introduction to Discourse, between 6 and 9 Apr. 1841.
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