On 16 April 1843, JS delivered a discourse in , Illinois, on death, burial, and the resurrection. The discourse developed a theme that JS had articulated eight months earlier, when he contemplated the graves of his deceased father, , and other relatives and friends. At that time, August 1842, JS described his hope that each member of his family—including those who were buried elsewhere, such as his brother and his children who died in infancy—would be interred together in the “Tomb of Joseph,” a mausoleum JS intended to build in Nauvoo. JS’s thinking on this issue was shaped by the biblical examples of the patriarchs Jacob and Joseph, whose remains were transported from Egypt and interred in Canaan.

JS returned to this theme on 16 April 1843 during the Sunday morning services held at the unfinished , after multiple Latter-day Saints who had “lost friends” requested that he “preach a funeral sermon.” JS was especially affected by the death of , a Latter-day Saint who died in late 1842 while serving a mission in and was buried there. JS’s scribe noted in his journal that JS spoke for about two hours on “the importance of being buried with the saints & their relatives inasmuch as we shall want to see our relatives first & shall rejoice to strike hands with our parents, children &c when rising from the tomb.” , another of JS’s scribes, hurriedly sought to capture the discourse as he heard it. Richards may have used loose paper to keep notes, which he later copied—and perhaps slightly refined—into JS’s journal. also inscribed an account of the discourse in his own journal. Unlike Richards’s irregular notes, Woodruff’s version is fairly polished, suggesting that he reconstructed JS’s words after the fact from memory or by using notes he took at the time or both, all of which were common practices for Woodruff. Both the Richards and Woodruff accounts of JS’s discourse are featured here. Annotation that appears in Richards’s version of the discourse is not repeated in corresponding locations in Woodruff’s version.