Ardis Parshall lived alone with her cats in a Salt Lake City apartment for much of her life. She had no advanced degrees, and, for most of her career, no phone or car. Yet — with her superhuman typing, command of French, determined work ethic, dogged sleuthing, eagle eye for underappreciated documents, and uncanny nose for a good story — she became indispensable to Mormon historians everywhere.
From her perch behind a computer screen and beside a tower of beloved books, Parshall created an extensive online community, where she helped scholars connect missing pieces in the present to the jigsaw puzzles of the past.
Parshall, a Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist who died Sunday at age 66, was always on call to read obscure transcripts or decipher seemingly unreadable correspondence. Can you trace who built this house in 1915? What did Latter-day Saint leader George Q. Cannon think about a visit from British novelist Charles Dickens? What did apostle John A. Widtsoe say about members who questioned church leaders?
She provided “an enormous bundle of documents” for Nate Oman as he was writing about law and Mormonism. She shared “invaluable correspondence” with Devery Anderson during his work on a biography of apostle Bruce R. McConkie.
But Parshall was especially interested in the everyday members — in the U.S. and abroad — whose faith and stories helped build The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a global force.
In a column about members living in far-flung countries like Turkey, Greece and Japan, she repeatedly saw the phrase “sheep without a shepherd” in which members bemoaned their lack of communication from church headquarters.
And she was willing to share her finds with those who might want to know them.
She was “the angel of FamilySearch,” said Hannah Jung, a future scholar who was trained by Parshall, “inserting precious stories for their descendants to see.”
“Ardis was an expert at tracing the untraceable,” said W. Paul Reeve, chair of Mormon studies at the University of Utah. “She dedicated her life to finding lesser-known people in Mormon history and then giving a voice to the voiceless.”
Parshall would follow clues wherever they led and then report what she found with honesty, he said, “always treating people of the past — no matter how humble — with dignity and respect.”
If Latter-day Saints “really knew history — knew the people on a personal level, knew the events as if we had been there, focused on fairness and not exaggeration to score points,” she wrote in The Tribune, “social life in Utah could be far better. Honest history can be healing.”
Immersed in history
Born in Ogden to George Edward Parshall and Edith Bernice Taylor, Parshall lived in the Beehive State for her first 10 years.
The family moved to Reno, Nevada, and then Las Vegas, which she considered home, according to an oral interview with historians Jonathan Stapley and Robin Jensen. “She spent two years in high school in Jackson County, Missouri, where she remembered visiting church history sites.”
She later served an 18-month mission for the church in Geneva, Switzerland, but spent much of her time in France — a time she has described as being personally, emotionally and physically challenging at the hands of a demanding and unloving mission president.
Through that trial, Parshall learned, she said, that “a man can and should and may be called of God, but it’s up to him, and him alone, whether he lives up to that calling. The same is true for me — I choose to do all I can to fill my role, or I choose otherwise.”
Upon her return, the future historian moved to Provo and spent loads of time in the library, searching genealogical records, helping her father (a Latter-day Saint convert) find his ancestors.
Eventually, she migrated to church history.
In the late 1990s, she began working “as a researcher-for-hire for established historians, writing my own history, and more recently blogging the kinds of stories and materials about our past that most interest me,” Parshall said in a 2011 speech. “I’ve come at this work through an unorthodox past — I regret that I have no formal training in history — but I seem to have been preparing for this work my whole life.”
Though it was tough to give up a job that provided financial stability, Parshall believed it was the right move for her.
It was “the old assurance that I had ‘so many choices,’ for instance, that gave me the courage to leave work that I hated,” she said, “and choose to do something I love.”
Partnerships galore
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) W. Paul Reeve, Simmons chair of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, formed a lifelong friendship with Ardis Parshall.
Reeve first met Parshall “as a snot-nosed graduate student doing research at the Church History Library,” he recounted on social media. “She, a perfect stranger, heard me ask the librarian on staff about correspondence between Brigham Young and residents of a ... ghost town, Hebron, as well as other obscure Mormon villages that straddle the Utah/Nevada border. She perked up. When the moment was right, she approached me and let me know that she had transcribed some correspondence with people from those very towns. She was willing to share them with me, she said, after we visited for a bit. That was it. That was the start of a friendship that I will forever cherish.”
The two went on to co-edit “Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia,” Reeve noted. “I did a few guest posts at Keepapitchinin [Pashall’s history blog] and she did a bio of my brother who was shot and killed in Vietnam for a post on Keepapitchinin, which I still treasure.”
She was an original contributor to the University of Utah website Century of Black Mormons and had served on its advisory board since its launch.
Parshall wrote regular history columns for The Tribune in two separate eras. In 2021, the Mormon History Association created the annual Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award in her honor.
“Not only did we name the award after her … we also gave her the inaugural award, which she did not know she was going to receive,” historian Barbara Jones Brown explained at the time. “It was a very emotional moment. Everyone jumped to their feet and gave her a standing ovation.”
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Historian Barbara Jones Brown, appearing on the "Mormon Land" podcast in 2019, pointed to the award named in Ardis Parshall's honor.
The thunderous reception was hardly surprising. “Ardis’ contributions to Mormon studies are everywhere, in footnotes, in sources, in her own writings, on Keepapitchinin, in books and articles,” Reeve wrote. “They are significant and enduring.”
She was “the best, the most dogged and generous researcher out there. No comparison, really,” historian Janiece Johnson said. “My messages with her are full of this tidbit and that source that helped me see more clearly all the facets of whatever I was working on.”
Parshall always “saw the individual, the personal, in history,” Johnson said. She was a “stubborn believer.”
A pandemic gift
In late April 2020 — amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic — Parshall began to write a series of blog posts titled “Who We Lost,” documenting the lives taken during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-20.
“They became ubiquitous — nearly 230 posts over the span of a little over 12 months,” historian Robin Jensen noted on social media. “It was typical Ardis. She was alone during the pandemic lockdown trying to not go stir-crazy. She needed something to occupy her mind. So she turned to the past.”
They stood, Jensen said, as “daily reminders that we weren’t, in fact, alone during a very lonely time.”
Loyal and ‘prickly’
Those who knew Parshall said she was a “fierce friend,” adding that she could be “prickly” with demanding, arrogant or boorish associates.
That was because, wrote one, “Ardis absolutely refused to suffer fools gladly.”
Another added: It was due to “her uncompromising values and her refusal to ‘both sides’ anything. She fiercely stood for what she believed was right.”
She definitely had strong opinions, a former congregant wrote on social media. “It was my privilege … to commiserate [with her] about hymn tempos, bad advice to Mormon singles, and doctrinally suspect talks, etc.”
She bristled at researchers who expected her to share her finds without pay or recognition. It was especially galling when she discovered in 2019 that an author had lifted, without crediting, large swaths of her work in a book highlighting little-known facts about church history.
It’s the “taking of my unseen and unrecognized expertise that hurts more than the taking of my words,” Parshall said at the time. “She has taken my research, my uncanny skills at being able to follow a trail through the archives, my scholarly conclusions, my professional judgments. These are not just ‘facts which cannot be copyrighted.’”
The historian reached a settlement with the publisher, but it still stung and made her wary.
A reunion in heaven
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) A graveside service is expected to be held to honor Ardis E. Parshall.
In her end-of-life instructions to Reeve, Parshall — who reported undergoing cancer treatments last year — insisted on no funeral or viewing.
“Ardis was adamant about this. She threatened to haunt me should I deviate from her wishes,” Reeve said, writing that “if anybody overrules me to hold anything more than a simple graveside service, I will come back to haunt you all.”
The passionate researcher, though, did believe in an afterlife and was looking forward to meeting her parents and the people she had “discovered” through her historical detective work.
Years ago, Parshall imagined herself in heaven with such members.
“I am moved by their lives far more easily than I am moved by holy scripture, and I am motivated more to pattern my life after theirs than I am after the stories of Israelites and Nephites,” she said in her 2011 speech. “Where those good people of the past — those in my own lineage, and those in my Mormon heritage — may be is where I want to spend eternity.”