Less than four years before his death, Joseph Smith began introducing LDS members to new, ritualized forms of worship. Several of these rites linked individuals not only to God but also to their immediate families and then ancestors. The rituals, practiced by both men and women, served to introduce initiates to new theological developments. On a more practical level, they established layers of social contacts around which the LDS community revolved, bonded, and interacted.

Lisle G Brown makes his comprehensive data base available to researchers 160 years after the fact, identifying the men and women who were initiated into the nexus of temple ritual and priesthood ordinances during the early to mid-1840s. He includes dates for endowments, marriages, proxy marriages, sealings to parents, adoptions of living adults to married couples, and second anointings.

Lisle G Brown is Professor of Library Studies and Curator of Special Collections at Marshall University in West Virginia. He is the editor of Preserving the Word, which is a catalogue of Anglo-Irish literature and criticism, and West Virginia: A Historical Resource Guide, as well as a contributor to American Legislative Leaders in the South, 1911-1994. He has published in Brigham Young University Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, West Virginia History, North Dakota History, and elsewhere. He is also the webmaster for Marshall's Special Collections and virtual museum.