Andrew Jensen, Latter-day Saint Historian

What judgment can we make of Andrew Jenson—Latter-day Saint, traveler, writer, historian? He arrived in America a poor, uneducated boy who, because of his broken English, was faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yet he aspired to greater things, and in his lifetime accomplished much. Jenson made his greatest contributions through his writing and collecting ability. The span of Andrew Jenson’s 91 years gave him an unbelievable scope and understanding of Latter-day Saint history, enabling him to provide the basis for a continuous and comprehensive narrative of the Church’s history up to 1900. Of the twenty-five persons who have served as Church Historians and Assistant Church Historians since 1830, none has made a greater contribution in the collection of primary materials, the organization of them for research purposes, the indexing and cataloguing of materials and the preparation of volumes of narrative and documentary history.