About the Author

Until August 2009 when he retired, William G. (Bill) Hartley was an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University.

Bill, born in Salt Lake City, spent his boyhood and youth years with his four brothers in Butte, Montana, and the San Francisco Bay Area in Sunnyvale and San Lorenzo, California. His mother was a devout Latter-day Saint with pioneer ancestry; his father, a Southern Pacific executive who grew up in Oregon, was not LDS. Bill graduated from Arroyo High School and attended Brigham Young University. He filled a two-year mission in the Eastern States and Cumorah missions, then resumed his studies and graduated from BYU with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. He completed doctoral course work at Washington State University.

In 1972 he joined the staff of research historians assembled by Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington and researched, wrote, and published Mormon history in scholarly journals and Church magazines and media. Bill helped found and then direct for four years the Church’s Oral History Program. In 1980, Arrington’s team of historians became the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at BYU, where Bill also became part of the History Department faculty. During his twenty-nine years at BYU, Bill developed three areas of expertise: the history of the restored priesthood, Mormon Trail emigration, and family histories.

A prolific writer, Bill is the author or coauthor of thirteen books and author of more than a hundred articles dealing with U.S., Mormon, and family history. He is the recipient of four best book awards and five best article awards from the Mormon History Association, John Whitmer Historical Association, Utah State Historical Society, and the Association for Mormon Letters. His award-winning books include “My Best for the Kingdom”: History and Autobiography of John Lowe Butler, a Mormon Frontiersman (1993), Stand By My Servant Joseph: The Story of the Joseph Knight Family and the Restoration (2003), and Anson Bowen Call: Bishop of Colonia Dublan, coauthored with Lorna Call Alder (2007). He is coeditor, with Grant Underwood and Robert J. Woodford, of two volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers scheduled for publication in 2012.

Bill served as president of the Mormon History Association and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Mormon History and Mormon Historical Studies. As founding president of the Mormon Trails Association and a “trail junkie,” Bill has extensively traveled and done on-site research on the Mormon Trail and the Mormon Battalion routes.

Bill married Linda Perry. They have six children and eleven grandchildren.