Found in the Archives: Joseph F. Smith’s Patriarchal Blessing

Years ago I was combing BYU’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections for materials related to Joseph F. Smith, 6th president of the Church. I found a number of hidden treasures, including a holograph copy of a patriarchal blessing supposedly given to Joseph F. Smith more than a year and a half prior to his first Hawaiian mission, when he was thirteen years old. The blessing had already been electronically catalogued by BYU, so seemed to me a valuable artifact that had been “hidden in plain sight.” No previous biographer of JFS, from Joseph Fielding Smith to Scott Kenney, had used this blessing in discussing JFS’s early life.