Told he had an ancestor "who founded the state of Utah," Kennedy said his father pulled out a box of old photos and documents the teenager had never seen. As he laid them out, the doorbell rang. "Two young men were standing there with name tags and the first name 'Elder,'" he recalled.
When they were invited inside, "The first thing they saw was a picture of Lucy (Mack Smith) and Emma (Smith). They asked me what I was doing," and when he told them, "they just went nuts," he said, grinning. Meanwhile, missionaries taught a girl named Darcy Dodge, who eventually became Kennedy's wife after both joined the church. At the time, they were the only Latter-day Saints in tiny Tonapah, Nev.
Shortly after high school graduation in 1973, Kennedy was baptized — not because he fully understood or believed what he had been taught, he said, but "so (the missionaries) could feel successful, and so I could go on my way and be happy."
Unbeknownst to him, information about Kennedy's family tree made its way to Salt Lake City. He was summoned by then-LDS Church President Harold B. Lee. "I was pretty scared. I'd only been baptized for 30 days, and the president of the church wanted to see me," he said. Asked what he knew about Joseph Smith, he replied he only knew what was in his history report.
"I told him how Joseph Smith discovered the state of Utah. He excused himself and came back a few minutes later with a new apostle named Bruce R. McConkie," who tutored Kennedy in LDS history. Soon Elder McConkie gave permission for Kennedy to be ordained an elder in the church — something that usually takes at least a year following baptism. During his ordination, "I was told I was the first in Joseph Smith's line to receive the Melchizedek priesthood in fulfillment of prophecy."
After he and Darcy married in the Provo Temple in 1974, Kennedy said he learned quickly to keep the story of his lineage to himself, and he also swore his wife to secrecy. As part of learning about LDS history, the Smiths and Joseph's vision of restoring Christ's original church, the couple spent a semester in Israel with BYU Study Abroad in 1976, taking their young son along. Though he maintained a low public profile, church leaders interacted with and kept track of Kennedy.
During a 1984 interview with President Gordon B. Hinckley, then a counselor in the church's First Presidency, Kennedy was charged with building a family organization for the descendants of Joseph and Emma Smith. By 1985, he had the organization in place and was working with church officials, archivists and another Smith descendant — Gracia Jones — to find and document the Smith family tree.
To date, he said they have documented roughly 1,900 descendants — far fewer than they had expected to find, based on the number of children born to Joseph and Emma's surviving children. (Several had died as infants.)
"Their descendants had an extremely high mortality rate," Kennedy said, with deaths attributed to "everything from suicides to broken marriages to people who just didn't want to have children."
After more than two decades of contacting family members — about one-third of them live in Australia — Kennedy said he believes that after Joseph Smith was martyred by a mob in 1844, "Satan turned the revenge (for Joseph Smith's founding of the LDS Church) on his family. We ended up with much more than just two religious groups (the LDS Church and the Reorganized Church, started by Joseph and Emma Smith's sons) disagreeing here."
Even so, a 17-foot-long family tree detailing the couple's progeny now adorns a wall in the church's Family History Library. It shows Kennedy's family as descendants of the Smiths' son Alexander. Kennedy said he and Jones have found almost 1,500 living descendants. Of those, 130 to 140 are Latter-day Saints with various degrees of church activity.
Baptisms, endowments and sealing ordinances were performed by proxy in LDS temples for the documented descendants who are deceased, he said.
Kennedy recently returned from Independence, Mo., where he visited the family of Joseph Smith III, who founded the Reorganized Church after his father's death. He, his mother, Emma, and the Smiths' other children remained in Nauvoo, Ill., following the exodus of Latter-day Saints, led by Brigham Young, to the Salt Lake Valley.
Kennedy said he and a descendant of Joseph Smith III plan a yearlong project to identify the descendants in that line and invite them to join the Joseph Smith Jr. Family Organization. The group — many of whom gathered in Nauvoo this summer for a second non-denominational family reunion — continues to grow, Kennedy said, providing information and outreach to family members who have never heard of Smith or the faith traditions that ultimately grew out of his experience.
A Web site — www.josephsmithjr.com — explains the history to those interested and seeks their participation. Another Web site — www.josephsmithjr.org — will be established in mid-November as the home page for the Joseph Smith Jr. and Emma Hale Smith Historical Society. Images of Smith family documents and artifacts will be made available to the public on the Web site, Kennedy said.
While the LDS Church and the Community of Christ archives house documents about Joseph Smith and the early years of LDS history, many descendants also have original copies unavailable elsewhere, he said. An effort is under way to obtain copies of those documents for Brigham Young University's Lee Library collection.
Kennedy recently learned of one document, in Smith's handwriting, that explains the "celestial marriage covenant," and is now held by a woman living in the Midwest. Another person in Utah has documents relating to a story Emma Smith told her son David, who became an artist, about temple ordinances first performed in Nauvoo in the red brick store.
While neither the LDS Church nor the Community of Christ are formally involved in the Smith family organization, both have provided assistance with research and resources, and advised Kennedy on where to find information. While some Smith descendants are still part of the Community of Christ, those numbers are shrinking, he said, estimating that "less than 5 percent" of descendants are now part of that faith.
First and foremost, Kennedy wants all descendants to have the chance to connect with family — and that's how he approaches those he has the chance to contact. Though both churches have their histories and the documentation to support them, "We're painting a larger picture of what happened to the family itself."
