Lucy Smith

Born Lucy Mack in 1775, she is remembered for her close involvement in the early Latter Day Saint movement and for preserving family history in writing. She married Joseph Smith Sr. and later became known to many readers through her account of the Smith family’s life.

Her best-known book, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations, gathered memories about her son Joseph Smith and earlier generations of the family. That memoir has remained a widely used historical source because it offers a personal window into the people around the movement’s beginnings.

Lucy Mack Smith died in 1856. Even apart from her family connection, she stands out as a nineteenth-century religious memoirist whose writing helped shape how later generations understood a formative period in American religious history.