Travis Wayne Goodsell

Real Latter-Day Saint Church History Travis Wayne Goodsell

I was born and raised in the LDS Church of the Brighamite Branch and had been lied to about the founding of the Church. This is why I needed to do actual research to find out what went on with the Church I was brought up in and believed without researching my life to almost 50 years of age now. But my years in the Church supplied me with a library's worth of knowledge including a recognition of conflicts of fact, withholding of evidence, and outright deception by the Church's Leaders and their manuals. As I worked on this book, I found new facts that required a need to make some corrections, such as which Congregationalist Church the Smiths attended. I hope I remember to put the right one on the back cover of the print book. It is by sticking to the facts that the big picture emerges and explains how additional facts fit in. I was completely caught off guard to realize a new narrative than what I'd been taught and what the September 6 discovered but presented as a narrative. I cannot justify the Smiths and even Joseph as practitioners of witchcraft, the collection of the facts just does not lead to it. I envisioned them as a normal family struggling to survive in the New America. Their New Israelite influence did not turn them to witchcraft, nor polygamy for that matter. Instead I saw Joseph Smith Sr as a very wise and good man who just couldn't get a break in life to be successfully prosperous in taking care of his family. In the Mormon Church today, such presiding as the head of the household is not only frowned upon, but is condemned and even punished similar to Vermont's law to kick out the poor from their State.