Textual Resources
General Conference Research Guide
This collection includes reports from 1880 and from 1897 to 2011. Conference reports include information about the conference itself (for example, the sessions held, times, and dates), the General Authorities and Officers of the Church that were present and presiding, leadership changes and deaths of prominent members announced at the conference, statistical and financial information, prayers given, musical numbers and congregational hymns sung, and transcripts of talks given. Before conference was recorded or broadcast, these reports—published by the Church and available for purchase shortly after conference—were how the information delivered at conference was disseminated to many of the Saints who could not gather on Temple Square.
Paper copies of the reports from 1897 to 2017 (when publication ended) are available to view at the Church History Library.
Early Church Conference Reports
This site contains conference reports from 1830 to April 1897. These reports are gathered from published material (Deseret News and Millennial Star) and transcribed with standardized spelling and grammar. The website is basic but fills a significant gap in conference coverage. This is not a Church-sponsored website, and the Church does not endorse the content.
General Conference on ChurchofJesusChrist.org
Video, audio, and written transcripts of conference talks from 1971 to the most recent conference are available on ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Conference talks on this website are organized by year, month, and session. Speakers are listed in the order they spoke, along with their photograph, the title of their discourse, and their name. Business such as the sustaining of General Authorities and Officers is also included. Conference talks are also discoverable by a topical search on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org home page. Type a topic in the search bar and click Search. Fine-tune the search by selecting General Conference, found under the search bar. Or search talks about (topic) and select the first search result, General Conference Talks About (Topic), to open a list of several talks on the subject. The same method can be used to search by the name of a General Authority or the title of a talk.
This website contains a searchable body of conference talks from 1851 to the present. The site allows unique keyword search options, including identifying how often a topic has been mentioned in conference and providing the context of a word or phrase. These features demonstrate recognizable and significant trends in conference topics and themes. The site provides video tutorials that aid in understanding how to use the site and the information it generates. It is hosted by Brigham Young University. This is not a Church-sponsored website, and the Church does not endorse the content.
Periodical Reports
Church periodicals have been printing conference talks since 1942, with few exceptions. From 1942 to 1950 conference reports were printed in the May and November issues of the Improvement Era. In 1943 the April conference was covered in the May, June, and July issues because of wartime paper shortages.
From 1951 to 1970 the talks were printed in the June and December issues, except for the December 1957 issue. October conference that year was cancelled due to the Asian flu epidemic.
In 1971 the Improvement Era became the Ensign, and conference issues were not immediately standardized. Conference talks appear in June and December 1971, July 1972, January and July 1973, and January 1974.
In 1974 the Ensign magazine returned to printing conference talks in its May and November issues. A note from the editors in the May 1974 issue states, “This issue of the Ensign contains, in chronological order, the addresses and proceedings of the general conference sessions. It also contains news of the announcements and presentations associated with the general conference sessions.”1 This pattern continues to the current conference. Conference talks are also published in the Liahona in 50 languages. In 1997 the Ensign started posting general conference talks on the Church website a few days after conference.
This site provides a searchable index to all the scriptures quoted or referenced in conference addresses from 1942 to the present. It also documents scriptures referenced in talks from the Journal of Discourses between 1839 and 1886 and in Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith. The site is hosted by Brigham Young University. This is not a Church-sponsored website, and the Church does not endorse the content.
At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women
This volume is a collection of addresses given by women throughout the history of the Church. While not all the discourses in the book were given at general conference, many of them were. The book also contains an appendix that lists all female speakers in general conference from 1845 to 2016. The list includes the dates and the sessions during which the women spoke.
[1] “Report of the 144th Annual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Ensign, May 1974, 1.