Charles C. Rich and his colorful life and career warrant a work as comprehensive as this DVD publication. Born in 1809 in frontier Kentucky, he spent a good part of his life pioneering and colonizing the expanding American frontier in his effort to establish The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and build up the kingdom of God.
The documents included in the Charles C. Rich DVD Library reflect Rich’s life and his pursuit of “purity and holiness.” Beyond the necessary system requirements, foreword and acknowledgments, and DVD bibliography, the collection has seven sections. The first section is a chronology of Charles C. Rich, his wives, and his family beginning in 1809, the year Rich was born, and continuing through 1917, when Emeline Grover Rich, the last of Rich’s wives, died. Next follows a Biographies section and a Family Histories section, which include biographical studies of Rich and his wives. A letters section follows containing six letters written by Charles C. Rich. The Manuscripts section of the DVD contains high-resolution scans of handwritten manuscripts from as early as 1833 such as journals, mission records, financial papers, certificates, blessings, family documents, and personal, ecclesiastical, and business correspondence. Many photographs of Rich and his family have been included in the collection as well as some speeches he gave as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Unfortunately, there is one drawback to this DVD collection. The collection, because it contains so many scanned documents, is not fully word searchable. This means that though some individual documents can be searched, no searches can encompass the whole collection. This minor problem notwithstanding, I wholeheartedly recommend the Charles C. Rich DVD Library to scholars of Mormon or Western history, as well as those who are interested in studying the family dynamics of a nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint family.
