After decades of work, the first volumes of the Emmeline Wells’ diaries went live today on the Church Historian’s Press website to little fanfare. See the press release here. A prominent Latter-day Saint leader and women’s suffrage activist, Wells was a prolific diarist. The forty-seven extant volumes of her diary offer an expansive view in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century life in Utah. The first six are now live with more expected later in the summer.

This project began in the 1990s with Cherry Silver and Sheree Bench at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute as a part of their women’s history initiative led by Jill Mulvay Derr and Carol Cornwall Madsen. While numerous others have contributed significantly to the project over the decades, Silver and Bench remain at the helm. See a more complete history of the project here. 

The website includes the first six volumes of Wells’ diaries, an extensive biographical register headed up by Paddy Spillsbury and her team, a complete chronology, images, and additional documents, as well as fantastic silent film footage of Wells from 1920 here. 

Go check it out today. We will expect a more fitting celebratory announcement appropriate to this achievement in the next few months.  We also can look forward to the Eliza R. Snow sermons also in the works at the Church Historian’s Press.