About Kim

I’m Kim Marshall, a professional artist and digital artist. For more than seventeen years, I have been researching one photograph of Joseph Smith Jr., and this site is where I keep the work: the comparisons, the questions, the answers I’ve found, and the ones I haven’t. I mirror a lot of this on my Facebook page as well.

How it began

Years before I started this blog, in 1998, I was visiting my grandmother when the conversation turned to genealogy. She handed me a book of copied journal accounts from some of our pioneer ancestors. On one odd page, among yellowed newspaper clippings about Joseph Smith Jr., a small photograph sat sealed under a plastic cover. It was a thin, silver-gray image matted on card stock, with the words “Copy of the Original Tintype” written underneath.

My grandmother told me it was a photograph of Joseph Smith Jr., and that she had received it many years earlier on her mission in Texas in the late sixties.

One day in 2009 I ran across something on the internet that sparked my curiosity. I began comparing the photograph with other known images and with a death mask. This is when I learned of the controversy, and it marked the beginning of my discovery.

In March of that year, Richard E. Turley, then Assistant Church Historian and Recorder for the LDS Church, came to my home, and I showed him the photograph and talked through the theories. I was invited to bring it to Salt Lake for the Church History Department to examine further. In the spring of 2009, ABC4 News in Utah reported the story. You can watch those reports.

Where it stands

The blog has grown into a long record of that work, from the first comparisons in 2009 to the analysis of the Larsen daguerreotype in 2023 and the newest posts. I have brought all of it here, keeping the original dates, so you can follow the search in the order it happened. Start with the exhibits on the home page, browse the research by topic, or read the timeline.

My wish is to present the evidence as clearly as I can. To make it easier for the viewer to look and decide with their own eyes, as well as present them with the facts and plausible theories.

Get in touch

If you have a question, a correction, or something that might help the research, please send me a message.