George D. Watt and the Journal of Discourses

George D. Watt

George D. Watt.

On the morning of July 30, 1837, a small group of the first Latter-day Saint converts in England met near the banks of the River Ribble in Preston. Two of them, each eager to be the first baptized, challenged each other to a footrace. “[They] were so anxious to obey the Gospel,” Elder Heber C. Kimball recalled, “that they ran with all their might to the water.” George D. Watt, a shoemaker in his 20s, won the race.

Shortly after his baptism, Watt became active in the missionary efforts throughout the United Kingdom, and in 1841 he was called to preside over the Edinburgh Conference. While in Scotland, Watt began to study Isaac Pitman’s shorthand method: a system so efficient that a skilled notetaker could keep up with the rate of speech.

After Watt immigrated to the United States, he used his shorthand skills to produce rich, detailed records of the way early Church leaders spoke. From 1853 to 1868, Watt recorded countless sermons and published more than 450 of them in the Journal of Discourses. Watt’s records, in contrast to other fragmentary accounts of early sermons, were the first to provide full reports of general conference to Saints living outside Salt Lake City. These transcribed sermons provide irreplaceable insight into the Church’s pioneer period and capture valuable details that would have otherwise been lost.