Library Posts Historic Diaries

Susan Fales, curator of BYU's digital and historical library collections, points to her mother's name in the missionary diary of George Edward Anderson.

The L. Tom Perry Special Collections of BYU's Harold B. Lee Library recently made 376 diaries from Church missionaries available online. "We have so many items that [people all over the world] might be interested in for their family history or for the historical value," says Susan Fales, curator of the library's digital and historical collections. The online collection features short biographies of 114 diarists who served missions from the 1830s to the 1960s, including Hyrum Smith. Color images of scanned diary pages and transcriptions of the handwritten diaries can be viewed at www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/mmd.