Welcome to another episode of Mormon discussion podcast. I'm your host Bill Real, and I'm grateful for the chance to be with you today. A week ago on Wednesday, we covered on Mormonism Live, RFM and I, the Fannie Alger story. We spent the first third of the episode going into the biographical information on Fannie. We spent the middle part of the episode going through the documents that

indicated that there was, in fact, an illicit affair between the prophet Joseph Smith and Fannie

Alger. And in the last third, we went into the documents and testimony of the charges that

Oliver Cowdry made against Smith of having an adulterous affair, a dirty, filthy, nasty

affair, to be exact, and also talked about the disciplinary counsel that then disciplined Oliver

Cowdery excommunicated him for slander for making those charges against Joseph. But when that

episode was over, I found additional data, more documents.

And I think they're important. I think they, by the time we're done, will, in a reasonable way,

answer both when and why Fannie Alger entered the Smith home. And I think both of those

are important to the conversation.

So I'll put the slides show up for tonight. Here's the, at least part of the thumbnail.

And we should note what multiple historians have broadly agreed upon. Historians like Mark Staker,

Ryan Hales, and David Golding, who do not share the same interpretive goals, converge on a key point that Fannie

Elger likely did not enter the Smith household until after the death of Mary Beal Johnson on March 30th,

1833. Mary Bill Johnson was living in the Smith home, which I believe at the time is the

Noolke Whitney store in K K. Whitney store in K.

And that she was assisting Emma.

This is what some say that she was assisting Emma during a difficult pregnancy and helping to tend to the children.

I think that's one option.

Another option is presented is that she was helping with the dairy production, the dairy business of Emma Smith. And we'll get into that in just a moment, too. And I just want to remind people that at the time, they have one child, Julia Murdoch, who was one of the two twins that they adopted. And the other twin died when Joseph Smith, if you remember the story that he was dragged out of bed at night, in the cold of night during winter, dragged across the ground and eventually tard and feathered in that that weather got to the other Murdoch child.

He was already sick.

His health got worse and he ended up dying.

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