As everyone in the Mormon History Association knows, on April 6, 1830, the day the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, Joseph Smith was told, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (D&C 21:1). This is the revelation upon which the office of church historian and recorder is based. And I would suggest, it is the statement that sits at the base of this organization.Although many of us feel bad from time to time that we do not have more records about the foundation and early life of the church, we do have an amazing amount, a very rich literary foundation. Joseph Smith soon called Oliver Cowdery to be the first church historian and recorder. Cowdery recorded minutes of meetings, patriarchal blessings, membership information, and certificates of priesthood authority. Both Cowdery and Smith began what might have been a narrative history of the church. The church keeps very impressive records. Look at our genealogical collections. Look at the Mormon History Association that has now celebrated its fifty-seventh annual conference and the many thoughtful records that were presented to us during this conference.I believe that we should all be recordkeepers. I believe that everyone, and especially everyone connected with the MHA, should be in the business of creating primary sources, firsthand accounts. We should all be keeping records. We can't document everything, but we should record something that might be useful in the future. Many people keep excellent photographic histories. Some write notes about every church meeting they attend. Some write their responses to the books they've read. But I think that the basic best is a personal journal. My mother and grandmother were faithful recordkeepers. But for a long time, I just couldn't make myself do it.I was more than forty years old when I was driving to Maryland from Delaware to give a book talk at an old folk's home for the Delaware Humanities Forum, our local National Endowment for the Humanities operation. I was reporting on Mary Chesnutt's Civil War journal. She was an officer's wife based in Washington, acquainted with all the important people. She went out socially, and then came home and wrote about it. A great record. I thought how she, who kept a record, would be remembered, while I, who did not write one, would be forgotten. That was my moment. I came home and began to keep a journal and many, many years later, I still do it.Almost every day I add to a monthly computer document. At the end of the month, I print the document, punch holes in it, and put it in a binder. I have hard and soft copies of the experiences of many years. I write whatever I have to say, maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. I'm a trained historian, in that I have some degrees, but I'm also an accidental historian.Many years ago, I was visiting my father in San Francisco. I had flown from the east. Although it was very late at night for me, Dad wanted to talk about how the church planned to remodel the very nice chapel building that had risen, under his supervision, during the depression when he was the bishop. We all loved the building, just a couple of blocks from our house in the Sunset district. We had been there almost every day of our early lives for some reason or other and now they were going to redo it and my father, who had built it, was helpless to do anything about it. Well, I knew all this. He had been talking about it for a year; all phone calls and letters had discussed this terrible prospect. I could hardly stay awake. But, with a sudden inspiration, I said, “Just a minute, Dad.” I plugged in my little computer and said, “Now, start over.” He talked slowly and I typed fast, and by the time he was ready to go to bed, I had three good, single-spaced pages of the story in his words. We went back to the story every day of my visit and by the time I left, I was writing an article about Sunset Ward.I told how my father—a farm boy from Utah, knowing nothing about construction—was, as a bishop, saddled with this terrible responsibility. How he hopped the train to Salt Lake City one morning and confronted Presiding Bishop LeGrand Richards about the terrible management of building chapels and was told, firsthand, how the church was not building meeting houses—it was building men. How the building, which was to have been constructed by church members, was picketed by union workers after the project was reported by a ward member. How the organ pipes, which arrived before they could be installed, were vandalized. Dad told me how he had managed to hang a huge replica of the Hoffman painting of Christ praying in Gethsemane above the choir seats. How the Mutual Improvement Association had thoughtlessly scheduled a big dance before the hardwood floor was installed in the cultural hall. I knew all these stories, but I got them in his voice and in his words.Then, I described some of the wonders of the building: a ladies’ room with a large primping space—a wraparound mirror and little stools, as in a fancy department store; a baptismal font with an illuminated stained glass window; a bas relief over the front door of a kneeling Joseph Smith painted in pastels; a Relief Society workroom with space for a large loom and a quilting frame, as well as barrels of staples; also the official Relief Society Room, furnished by the ladies themselves—as those rooms were in those days—like a large living room, full of secondhand wooden armchairs, skillfully reupholstered in harmonious fabrics by the clever sisters. I talked about the choral concerts, the three-act plays, the weekly dances for young people, the big balls with formal gowns and live orchestras. What wonderful times we had there.When I next visited, the restoration was complete. The white chapel with red theatre seats, which had been bought from a failed concern for pennies on the dollar, morphed into a quietly handsome new space with tan walls, green carpets, and dark pews, the colors of California's beaches and forests. My father was reconciled. I could appreciate the new beauty though there was nothing in it that said it was a church. Gone was the baptismal font; the primping room; the Relief Society workroom; the stage; the large boy scout room with the knotty pine walls built in an excavated hillside adjacent to the chapel and never on any plans; and the film projection room, high up in the cultural hall, accessible via a metal ladder screwed to the wall. The large picture of Christ in Gethsemane went on a long odyssey from building to building while various people tried to throw it out, before it was eventually rehung in the lobby. What we now had was lots and lots of little bare classrooms.I wrote this all up and it was published in Dialogue, and it's probably the most popular thing I have ever written.1 Someone is always rediscovering it and copying it for people who now worship in that building. I'm proud of myself for realizing that this was a significant thing to write about. By the time the building was completed, I was moving on to gather my father's additional extended memories and experiences that eventually turned into a Kinko published book, The Recollections of Serge J. Lauper. He was involved in this project from the beginning and approved it at every stage. So, I was surprised when, after it was published, he sent me a long page of errors. I decided to do a second edition with corrections and additions, and we printed enough of those that my father could give them out freely. At his funeral, some years later, everyone spoke out of that little book.I later did a similar project about the subdivision I lived in in Delaware named Oaklands. I was teaching Delaware history at the university. I was the president of the local historical society that I had organized. I was working with the wife of the developer, and I wrote up a little origin story that was published in the journal Delaware History and is still copied and given out to new people who move into the neighborhood.2That's one of the kinds of history that I do, whatever falls into my hands. When my mother died, I gathered her papers and submitted them to Brigham Young University's Special Collections Department. I realized that she had mostly kept a series of five-year diaries from the time she was married until the day of her final stroke. It took me a while to realize that those diaries should be transcribed and I eventually copied those little entries over a five-year period of being in Provo for the summers. The entries are brief, but they tell many wonderful stories. I was born and grew up in those pages. My mother spoke a little too freely about some things in her journals, so I only gave those books to my sisters.I had put the extensive papers of my genealogist grandmother into BYU's special collections without reading them at all. One day I could not find a copy of her twelve-page triumphant accounting of her life. She had written this as her calling card and caused it to be reproduced and distributed in great numbers. But I couldn't find it, and so I went to BYU and called for it. I was astounded when the librarian brought out a full-scale, handwritten autobiography. A long document that I had not been aware existed. This much longer document included her triumphs, but also her many heartbreaking sorrows. I decided that this one should be published. I had the manuscript copied and transcribed it. One summer, some cousins and I compared the manuscript to my typewritten transcription and corrected it, telling our own stories along the way. My grandmother's story was eventually published in the Utah State University Press series of life writings of LDS women.3I never expected or wanted to be a historian. I majored in English literature at Wellesley College. When I worked toward a master's at Brigham Young University, I received it in American literature. I read lots of novels and biographies. When it was possible, I applied to a doctoral program in English at Boston University. My husband was a newly hired history professor there, and his department chair was willing to apply pressure to admit me to the doctoral program. The English chair, a single man, did not want me. Although my credentials were good enough, I was already an old lady with five little children at home. As he memorably moaned, “Oh, Mrs. Bushman, why don't you just stay home with your children!” But I was admitted. I enrolled in night school to study Latin, one of the four languages that a doctorate in English required.Richard had been hired to develop a new program in American studies in the history department at Boston University along with David Hall. He came home one evening and reported that the faculty had discussed how many languages to require for an American studies PhD. They had decided that a single extra language would be enough. Within a week, I had dropped out of the English department and was enrolled in the new American studies program.We did lots of new things, reading the popular literature of the past rather than the classics, studying old fashioned household manuals, street maps, advertisements, travel literature, and diaries. We studied material culture, things, the leavings of the past of common people.I decided that I would study women, the first person I ever knew to consider that topic, and I would do women's work, comparing my life to women of the past. My first big project was on the mill girls of New England, the first regularly paid female workers. I added my interests in historical housewifery, women's traditional work, making cheese and soap, growing and processing flax, learning to spin and weave, all those things I am very glad to know how to do and glad that I do not have to do. I worked at understanding real daily life. It was a great program.I wrote my dissertation about a real woman, Harriet Hanson Robinson, using her extensive collection of personal materials available at a library near my house. I could take my youngest child—my sixth child had been born along the way—to nursery school, work at the library for a couple of hours, pick him up and morph back into a housewife for the rest of the day. I had a lot of contemporary women's work to compare to the records of the past.I was at this same time meeting with a group of Latter-day Saint housewives. We were talking about LDS women's domestic lives, their church lives, church structure and so on. For various reasons, we began to undertake projects, and we did many that were very satisfying. One project was that, as a group, we turned out a women's issue of Dialogue—the pink issue.4 We worked hard on that for a long time. We also took on teaching a class at the LDS Institute where each of us researched a topic of LDS women's history and presented a class. We wanted that material to be permanent somewhere so we undertook publication. I took on the editing—receiving much help and encouragement from Leonard Arrington, our MHA patron saint—and eventually we formed a publishing company, Emmeline Press Ltd., and published the book ourselves as Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah.5 It was published about the same time as my doctoral dissertation.6 Almost suddenly, I had two books out.These things were not easy, and I don't want to suggest that they were. They were a tremendous effort, and I had plenty of other things to do. But when some idea calls out to us, something suggested by our circumstances, something that we can do, I think we have to do it. Writing a book is an awful thing to have to do. But in continued efforts, it does get done. I have great respect for you who write books because I know what it takes. I would always say, if you feel a call, answer it. Capturing all that thinking and working into a nice, crisp new published volume is very satisfying.When we moved to New York City, more than thirty years ago, I didn't know what to do with myself. I had left a job at the Delaware Heritage Commission where I was very involved in well-publicized statewide activities. We published a whole shelfful of books there, several of which I wrote or edited. Little Delaware, a state of eight hundred thousand people, is widely advertised as a place where you can be somebody. And I was somebody in that little pond.I moved to New York, a city of nine million where I could never be anybody. I had a job for a couple of months, but I was fired because I didn't suit. What was I going to do with myself? Back at the Delaware Heritage Commission, we had been thinking of how to commemorate the first landing in the new world of Christopher Columbus who was getting much more condemnation than celebration at that time. New York City was full of reminders of him. Was I not walking on Columbus Avenue? Auditing courses at Columbia University? Wasn't Columbus Circle, where proud Italian Americans had caused an undistinguished statue of the great navigator to rise, the center for the West Side? I had done a lot of replaying of historical events in Delaware and decided to visit the New York Historical Society to see what I could discover about Columbus. Maybe I could find something useful for Delaware.I ordered up a couple of books, looking for ways that Columbus had been celebrated in the past. The first books had some useful information. I thought it would make an interesting talk. Then I considered an article about Columbus's journey into history. “Wait a minute,” said the enthusiastic I, “there's a book here!” So, I became a scholar again. I returned to the library and soon I was writing a book that became America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero,7 a title suggested by Richard. Maybe I could find a place in New York. The Columbus book became my vehicle to feel at home in the city.The conclusion of my book, published in time for the celebration, was that Columbus—a vain, ambitious man who desired honor and riches—deserved to be remembered as the cruel and grasping Hispanic explorer that he was. But he had been rediscovered and celebrated by the American colonists at the birth of the United States because he served the need of a founding grandfather. Washington was the father of the country; Columbus, the grandfather, allowed the new United States to bypass their mother England at the time of the Revolutionary War. Columbus might well have thought that he deserved his honors, but he was drafted.We had not been long in New York when Richard planned a sabbatical. He had a grand scheme to study the agriculture of the Americas. I was going to work on that project too. Then we wondered which of the several large grants he had applied for would come through. The big grant with the National Endowment for the Humanities would give him three years of support. The one in New England would focus our study there. But the one in the south came through first. So, we did Southern farming. We spent a year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the National Center for the Humanities. We studied tobacco culture, learned the Texas two-step, attended pig pickings, and we had a wonderful time.At the beginning, we went to the University of North Carolina's Southern History Library looking for some good primary sources. Right away I found the multivolume journal of John Walker with entries from 1824 to 1832. Walker was a fervent Methodist who began as a shopkeeper and eventually farmed two big family spreads with enslaved labor, growing wheat in King and Queen County in Tidewater Virginia, just up the Mattaponi River, after tobacco growing had moved south. Walker's journal answered a four-part query every day: the weather; what work was done by whom; who was sick and how he had dosed them, treating both family and workers (he had a certificate and some remedies that made him a Thomsonian doctor); and a fervent testimony to his Christian beliefs in which he often referred to himself as “a poor illiterate worm.”8I learned a lot about farming from Walker before I discovered that additional volumes of his diary, taking him through the Civil War, from 1832–1867, were available in Virginia. So, I had a run from 1824 to 1867! And in Virginia I met a man who knew the Walker descendants, still living at Locust Grove where Walked had farmed, and who arranged for Richard and me to visit there and dine with the current owners. So, of course, I wrote a book about Walker.9 That's how my ill-assorted topics come together.I will mention one other of my historical projects. In 2008, I was teaching women's history in the Mormon studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. We did interesting projects and I reported on some to the Board of Governors of the program at a meeting. A visitor there said she was impressed with what we were doing and donated $10,000 to our program. What to do with that? I specialize in free projects and did not know what to do with real money. We eventually decided to use it to buy equipment to do an extended oral history of contemporary Mormon women. We worked out a questionnaire and eventually completed about two hundred interviews and transcriptions. Some of the students, now experienced, went on to gather material for their own dissertations via oral history. The transcriptions of our interviews are available to read in some libraries and they are very good reading. We did a book about them too.10I want to close with a reading from one of these oral histories, a woman from the islands, who sees LDS gospel principles through a different culture.I cannot tell you how happy it makes me that that little piece of prose was captured and saved. It could easily have been lost. We need to write about the things going on all around us. We need to keep records, to date them, and save them. We need to capture these things and pass them on to others. I hope that we all will create written primary sources for those coming later.