A technical directory for AI-agent scraping and critical scholarship on Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, the manuscript period, and the religious/cultural context of upstate New York & northern Pennsylvania.
Definitive edition of all extant Joseph Smith documents with verbatim transcripts + hi-res images. 1830 Book of Mormon page images, the Printer's Manuscript (R&T vol. 3), Harmony/Palmyra place & person pages, June 1829 copyright materials, legal/financial records.
Church History Library (SLC). Holds surviving fragments of the original BoM manuscript. Per JSP R5, "roughly 28 percent of the text … is extant"; editor Robin Scott Jensen: "of the nearly 500 pages placed in the Nauvoo House cornerstone, portions of 232 pages survive." 20M+ images digitized; ~1M added yearly.
~6,995 docs / 38,000+ pages. Coverage begins ~1833 (Woodruff baptized 31 Dec 1833) — little for the 1820s but covers 1830s conversion-era journals.
19th Century Mormon Article Newspaper Index, early LDS records, Whitney/Huntington papers, ETDs.
Former custodian of the Printer's Manuscript — sold to the LDS Church for $35M on 20 Sept 2017 (record sum exceeding the $30.8M da Vinci Codex Leicester); "earliest surviving copy of about 72 percent of the Book of Mormon text" (Steven E. Snow). Also sold Kirtland Temple + Nauvoo assets in 2024. Finding aids + on-site access.
Free full-text of many out-of-print Signature titles (Mormon history/biography). Static-ish HTML; scrape-friendly.
Peer-reviewed-style journal, searchable, static article pages, PDFs.
Topical answers wiki: BoM origins, witnesses, View of the Hebrews. Static HTML, easy to scrape.
Tanners' critical documentation: annotated reproductions of early LDS texts, lists of BoM textual changes. Older static HTML on archive.utlm.org; easy to scrape (bookstore closed 2023, web remains).
Searchable record database (1875 History of Poultney; View of the Hebrews comparisons). Mormonr offers sourced Q&A with document citations — great for locating primaries.
Archive of Mormon-studies periodicals + KnoWhys; searchable; PDFs. Also hosts Royal Skousen Critical Text materials context.
Ontario Co. originally included all of western NY. Deeds 1789–2002 (Phelps & Gorham Purchase divisions), Mortgages 1789–1947, Assessment Rolls 1790–1993, probate 1789–1975. 1789–1845 deeds online; census indexes (1845 Canandaigua, 1855, 1865).
Land records from 1823, court from 1823, probate from 1823. Zion Episcopal Church of Palmyra communicant/baptism lists 1823–1850. Mostly on-site/microfilm; some via FamilySearch.
270M+ records (1630–present). Digital Collections portal + primary-source education site. JS-driven; finding aids/catalog online.
Aggregates 160+ NY repositories on ContentDM. Agent route: ContentDM IIIF + API under the JS front end. Free.
Local manuscripts, atlases, newspapers — largely non-digitized, contact-based.
Harmony/Oakland Twp — where JS translated much of the BoM & married Emma Hale. Holds newspaper clippings on JS (catalogued as MS 10379), 1872 Beers' Atlas, Stocker's 1887 county history. Land records from 1810; deeds 1812–1922 on FamilySearch film. Small static site; on-site records.
Manuscript Groups list online (static HTML); most records on-site/Fold3. Harmony court records (deeds, Orphans' Court, Common Pleas — e.g., Noble v. Smith 1830) via Susquehanna County courthouse, Montrose.
Under-digitized daybooks/ledgers of Harmony-area merchants (Hale-family economic context). Largely offline; inquire directly.
NDNP historic newspapers through 1963. Most agent-friendly: loc.gov JSON/YAML API (no key; throttle), IIIF Image API, Text Services API (full text/word coords), bulk OCR + batch datasets. Migrated Aug 2025; legacy OCR redirects Apr 2026.
1,516,758 issues / 15,688,870 pages; 1,200+ titles spanning 1725–2025. Free; county browse + full-text. Veridian platform; per-page permalinks (?a=p&p=) + OCR text. Strong for Wayne/Ontario papers.
Tom Tryniski's one-man archive — over 57M scanned pages as of 2025 (1795–2007; mostly NY, some PA). Notoriously idiosyncratic (Flash-era "goldfish" search). Agent note: use fultonsearch.org (no Flash, sortable, same files). OCR noisy; images as PDFs; no API.
Wayne Sentinel printed the BoM title page 26 Jun 1829; Palmyra Freeman "Golden Bible" 11 Aug 1829; Abner Cole's Reflector printed BoM extracts Jan 1830 (copyright dispute). Scattered across NYSHN, Fulton, and transcribed on Uncle Dale's site.
Large subscription archives; login/paywall + anti-bot; not agent-friendly. Use for corroboration.
Premier pre-1877 American newspaper (18,000+ titles) & imprint repository; holds a physical View of the Hebrews. General Catalog (append "openlink" to find surrogates); GIGI image archive 279,000+ images, public-domain free under Creative Commons ("Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society"). No single all-digitized DB; many subscription sets on-site only.
Dale R. Broadhurst's massive transcription project of early newspaper articles on the Mormons (by region/decade, incl. 1826–1846 NY tabulated) + transcribed texts (Ethan Smith's 1823 View of the Hebrews w/ its Vermont copyright entry). Plain static HTML — ideal for scraping; best free index to obscure 1820s–30s press coverage.
Ethan Smith pastored Poultney 1821–1826; Oliver Cowdery's stepmother Keziah & half-sisters were members (baptism 2 Aug 1818). Key primary source for the View of the Hebrews–BoM debate. History of Poultney (1875) documents the Smith & Shute press (Northern Spectator) that printed View of the Hebrews.
Methodist camp-meeting/circuit, Baptist, and Presbyterian burned-over-district revival records. Finding aids online; records mostly on-site.
1830 BoM, View of the Hebrews (multiple), Dialogue runs, historical LDS magazines. Universal IIIF (iiif.archive.org/iiif/{id}/manifest.json), JSON metadata API, full-text OCR (_djvu.txt), direct downloads. Best bulk-access point.
Over 19M volumes as of Dec 2025 (~6.7M US public domain). OAI-PMH (MARC21/DC), Hathifiles metadata dumps, Bibliographic API, HTRC Data Capsule. (Data API retired Jul 2024.) Public-domain 1820s imprints downloadable; in-copyright search-only.
Full text of many 1820s imprints; permalinks ?id=. No official bulk content API; aggressive anti-scraping.
Definitive digitized corpus to 1819 (Evans) & 1820–1829 (Shaw-Shoemaker) — directly covers the 1820s milieu. Subscription-only; not agent-accessible without institutional auth.
19th-century books/journals, full text, free, static-ish. Good for antebellum religious periodicals.
Susquehanna deeds (1812–1922), probate (1683–1994), Ontario/Wayne land & probate, 1830 census. Images often browse-only (no OCR index). Excellent Wiki finding aids. Anti-bot; login-gated images.
JS deposited the title page 11 Jun 1829 with clerk Richard R. Lansing, U.S. District Court, Northern District of NY (Utica). Court + early federal copyright deposits held by NARA/LoC; the deposit is reproduced in JSP. (Cf. View of the Hebrews registered by clerk Jesse Gove, District of Vermont, 11 Jun 1823.)
Scholarly articles & dissertations (e.g., Larry C. Porter's 1971 BYU diss. on NY/PA origins, 1816–1831). Institutional login; anti-bot.
All issues free online (1966–present); also on Internet Archive. Scrape-friendly.
BYU Studies: open full-text + PDFs ("Copyright Laws and the 1830 Book of Mormon"; "Oliver Cowdery's Vermont Years"). Sunstone archives free. JMH via JSTOR/UIP.
Aggregates ~6,000 partner institutions. Agent-friendly: RESTful JSON-LD API (32-char key) + bulk download.
Millions of archival finding aids/MARC from WorldCat + repository contacts. Updated quarterly.
SNAC (built partly from 2.2M ArchiveGrid MARC records) maps people↔collections — useful for locating dispersed Smith/Cowdery/Whitmer papers.