It is April 28th. On this day in 1842, Joseph Smith attended the meeting of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo and delivered a powerful sermon that included a revelation that women were to lay hands on the sick, anoint with oil, and bless. It just so happens that I was talking to a close friend about this a couple of days ago, and I realized that I had never written up a bit of material on the topic.

It is somewhat well known that Latter-day Saint women regularly officiated in the healing and blessing liturgies of the church—even more so now with the increased accessibility of Nauvoo minutes and supporting materials for Saints. The healing liturgy was ritually diverse in the nineteenth century. Beginning in Nauvoo, first men, and then women, began to perform washing and anointing rituals for the sick. Both women and men often blessed pregnant women and by the late 1870s women in the church had formalized a particular washing and anointing ritual specifically for them. In archival documents, one frequently finds references to women washing and anointing “for confinement.”

Linda King Newell was one of the first people to work on female ritual healing. In her 1981 essay that she expanded to become the chapter in Sisters in Spirit, she used an incredibly important document—a washing and anointing text preserved in the Relief Society minute book of the Oakley 2nd Ward. This document was an example ritual text. I’ve never met Newell, and I would really love to know about how this text was discovered. I know that several of the folks in the History Department at that time had connections to Oakley, and I wonder if someone knew about it and shared it. Or did she find it while going through minute books? There is a photocopy of the text in her papers at the UU, and the microfilm minutes were not restricted at the old LDS Archives.

When Kris Wright and I started collaborating, we met at the old archives in the first floor of the Church Office Building in 2006. At that time, one could only access the catalog on-site, and we poured over it looking for potential leads. One of the first things that popped up was the Cannonville Ward, Panguitch Stake, Relief Society Minutes (LR1371 22), that was restricted. Its descriptive note indicated that it included: “prayers for washing and anointing of women during confinement.” This felt like a big deal. This was a 100% increase in known ritual texts. I also have no idea who found the document and who cataloged it. As of that point in time, no one had used the document for any publication. It seems like no one knew that it existed outside of the catalog. It also appears that the collection is still restricted.

In 2009, Kris and I received access to the Cannonville minutes and were able to transcribe the texts. Additionally as part of our research, we received access to a Relief Society collection that is still sort of off the grid (CR 11 304). This collection was apparently created by the General Relief Society (though I would love to understand its history better), and contained three ritual texts: 1) a undated example text for the sick, 2) a 1923 washing and anointing for confinement text created in the General RS office, and 3) an undated mimeograph washing and anointing text from Panguitch, Utah. Kris and I were able to draw on these texts, along with the Cannonville and Oakley texts for our 2011 “Female Ritual Healing” article.

Now there is a lot of work to do on these documents, and I believe that Kris will be doing some heavy lifting in her dissertation at Princeton. In 2016, as I was thinking about them while working on my book The Power of Godliness, I decided to map the confinement texts.

What caught my eye was the proximity of Panguitch and Cannonville. What’s more, the blessing texts from those two cities are almost identical. Perhaps there was something going on?

A quick check in the 1907 List of Stake Officers and Bishops (Thank you archive.org!), and I found the composition of the Panguitch Stake, which included Cannonville:

I then hypothesized that if the Panguitch mimeograph was circulated within the stake, then the Cannonville Relief Society would not be the only one to have included it in their minutes. I scoured the (now online) catalog of the Church History Library and gathered a list of potential collections. The next time I was in Salt Lake City, I stopped by the CHL and started digging.  As I remember it, Christopher Jones happened to be there as well, which is the best thing about research in the physical archive (seeing people that you know and love).  Within a couple hours I had gone through my list and was trying not to scare the missionaries by freaking out. Not all of the wards had Relief Society minutes available, but Tropic and Escalante not only had minutes, but also copies of the liturgical texts in precisely the same place as Cannonville’s–at the end of the minute book covering the period.

With the help of the CHL staff, I was later able to learn more about Relief Society Stake President Hannah A. Crosby from home, and I included some of those details in my book (p. 103-104). One of the fun things I didn’t include there was a December 20, 1904 line item from the Panguitch Stake Relief Society Account Book for a $2.50 hectograph (a sort of rudimentary mimeograph that often used the same purple ink). Perhaps the documents that ultimately landed in the General Relief Society files were created on this machine.

So, now we have six texts for washing and anointing for confinement and one text for the sick. Beyond the important analytical questions that haven’t been approach yet, I also wonder how many more of these documents are waiting to be found in the archival mountains.

Happy April 28th!