This recently discovered daguerreotype shows church founder Joseph Smith.īased on 19th-century newspaper quotes and correspondence between LDS and RLDS members, historians and Smith family members long believed that there was a photograph of Smith before his June 27, 1844, slaying.īut none had ever been found - until 2020.

(Courtesy of Daniel Larsen | photo by Jim Mathis) Larsen believes the “timing” is right for this photo to be published, he said, “and I believe Joseph knows that, too.” Finding the treasured daguerreotype “I knew Joseph was with me, I felt his spirit,” he said. It was also a “spiritual confirmation” of a mystical experience Larsen said he had in the Kirtland Temple shortly before converting from the Community of Christ to the LDS Church.

“I looked at it for an hour or so with my wife. “I just knew it was Joseph,” Larsen said this week. Larsen, who joined the Utah-based church in the past decade, believed the photo was his great-great-grandfather the instant he saw it, peeking out from a locket that had been passed down to him from his great-grandfather, Joseph Smith III, a son of Mormonism’s originator, who helped found what is now the Community of Christ and became its first president. It is titled “Hidden Things Shall Come to Light: The Visual Image of Joseph Smith Jr.” Today that daguerreotype and the story of its discovery by another Smith direct descendant, Daniel Larsen, are being published and explained in an extensive article in the John Whitmer Historical Association Journal.

“This isn’t surprising since Emma Smith herself didn’t think the portrait was a good likeness of her husband,” Mackay said in an interview from his home in Nauvoo, Ill., “and that a good portrait of him couldn’t be painted because his countenance was changing all the time.”

The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith Jr.