Joseph Smith's Family of Origin - John Turner Pt. 1 | Ep. 2023

Every new biography of Joseph Smith faces the same uncomfortable question. Why add another volume to a shelf that already holds Fawn Brodie’s controversial classic, Richard Bushman’s faithful masterpiece, and dozens of others? Historian John Turner’s answer, explored in a recent Mormon Stories Podcast interview, suggests we have not yet fully grappled with how Joseph Smith’s family of origin shaped the man who would upend American religion. Turner, a religious historian at George Mason University and outsider to the LDS tradition, brings a Protestant sensibility to the project that fits the 19th-century milieu Smith inhabited.

The Smith Family Context and Early Financial Ruin

The Smith family’s early years in Vermont and New York provide more than quaint backdrop. They reveal a pattern of financial risk and geographic instability that followed Joseph Smith throughout his life. Joseph Smith Sr. lost the family farm not through laziness or poor farming, but through a spectacularly ill-fated investment in shipping ginseng to China. This 1816 disaster forced the family’s relocation to Palmyra, New York, where they would eventually dig for treasure and encounter the golden plates.

Lucy Mack Smith’s memoir provides our primary window into these years, but Turner notes her account lacks the self-reflection we might expect. She does not describe her husband’s venture as foolish or characterize the family as naive victims. Instead, she presents the episode as misfortune without moral analysis. This narrative approach matters because it mirrors how her son Joseph would later describe his own setbacks. He moved from one risky enterprise to the next without the pause for recalibration that might have saved him from martyrdom.

Patterns of Risk and New Archival Evidence

Turner’s methodology centers on transparency about perspective rather than false objectivity. Unlike Brodie, who worked with limited archives and sometimes ventured into psychological diagnosis, or Bushman, who privileges the accounts of believers, Turner attempts to call balls and strikes while acknowledging his own position outside the faith. This approach yields specific insights about the Smith family dynamic: