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Mormon Battalion members gather for a photo at the 50-year anniversary of their enlistment with the U.S. Army.

Courtesy Brigham Young University

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Image of the home page of the Mormon Battalion website.

Courtesy Brigham Young University

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Kristina Kaufman works on the Mormon Battalion Project in the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University.

Courtesy Center for Family History and Genealogy

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Image of a Mormon Battalion muster roll.

Courtesy Brigham Young University

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The Brigham Young University Mormon Battalion Project website (mormonbattalion.byu.edu) is currently the only place where scanned images of the complete set of Mormon Battalion muster rolls dating from July 16, 1846, to March 14, 1848, are available to the public.

The website is managed by the Center for Family History and Genealogy, which is associated with the family history major in the BYU History Department. The center provides students the opportunity to learn, practice and improve genealogical research skills on projects that benefit family historians, families of U.S. POW/MIA and even relatives of people with genetic cancer.

The Mormon Battalion Project was started in 2015 by Jill Crandell, former director of the CFHG, with a goal of identifying all who played a role in the journey of the battalion. According to American military historian Lt. Col. Sherman L. Fleek, the battalion is unique in U.S. military history because it is the only unit formed based on a religious group.

While the battalion never fought in the war, the group’s 2,000-mile journey from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Diego played a significant role in the country’s westward expansion. “One of their largest contributions … was the trail they laid down through the barren landscape, known as the Mormon Trail. Many thousands of pioneers would literally follow in their footsteps in the decades that followed,” writes Nicholas Paul Mihora in his doctoral dissertation “The Mormon Battalion, Cooke’s Wagon Road, and the Making of the New West.”

A major breakthrough on the center’s project occurred last summer. While at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Crandell and Laura Anderson from the Mormon Battalion Association located all the extant original muster rolls of the battalion, which were not previously available to researchers.

Over the course of a few months, a group of five student researchers worked to extract information from the muster rolls and connect each document to the correct individual. Since then, more than 30 students and two professors have undertaken foundational research to provide documented details on the lives of the 494 soldiers, four government-assigned leaders, 11 aides or servants, four camp followers, 87 family members and eight guides — a total of 608 people.

In-depth research on Mormon Battalion members has led to interesting discoveries, as in the case of Richard Twiggs Sanders. Some historical records and family tradition state that in 1858, Sanders journeyed to Utah from California in preparation to move his children there after his wife’s death. He was supposedly killed on the way, and his children were left orphans in California. However, in 1878, a bounty land application was filled out in Richard’s name in British Columbia. While it is possible that the application could have been forged, the discovery could not be dismissed without further research.

In his application, Sanders specifically stated that he had been in British Columbia since July 1858, which was within a month of his supposed death. In the 1881 Canadian Census, a 55-year-old American man named “R. T. Sanders” was found in the province of British Columbia. The collective details from the bounty land application and the census were enough to debunk the prevailing story of his death in 1858. The newly discovered data not only rewrote the narrative but also raised deeper questions about his personal motivations, what he chose to leave behind and the life he built in Canada. As research continues, each discovery brings us closer to understanding not only the details of his life but his story as an individual.

Information on the Mormon Battalion Project website about Sanders’s life and the lives of other participants contains links to pension files, bounty land records and compiled military service records along with images of the original muster rolls. CFHG researchers also added each participant’s post-1840 residences, their deaths and their burials to their military records.

According to Alice Childs, assistant director of the Center for Family History and Genealogy, the current research on the Mormon Battalion Project has laid the foundation for continued work. Future goals for the project include documenting the participants’ births and marriages and finding additional records that add more depth to their stories.

“Uncovering the details about individuals who shaped our history, but may have been forgotten, helps us connect with others in a unique way — across the divide of time,” Childs said.

Kristina Kaufman is a junior from Three Lakes, Wisconsin, studying family history at Brigham Young University. She is a supervisor for the Mormon Battalion Project at the BYU Center for Family History and Genealogy.