Q: What can I actually do?
A: Three things, in order of usefulness.
The committee does not solicit donations, sell merchandise, or operate a paid membership tier. The work is funded by a small number of long-term supporters and is sustained entirely on volunteer time.
If you would like to help, in approximate order of usefulness:
1. Help us get the sealed twelve pages
The first twelve pages of the Carthage deposition remain sealed by a 1844 court order. The committee’s FOIA counsel has an active case. The strongest single intervention a private citizen can make is to write to the Illinois State Archives requesting release, citing the 1978 unsealing of the remaining twenty-six pages and the explicit non-objection of the surviving families. Volume matters.
2. Stop using the Smith-name seer-stone fragments
There is a small but growing trade in seer-stone fragments removed from the Church History Collection under dubious provenance. Do not purchase these fragments. Each purchase creates an economic incentive for further removal, and may, in the worst case, place a fragment with residual isotopic content in private hands without proper documentation.
3. Tell someone
The committee has found that the single most effective thing any reader of this site can do is to tell one other person about the Files. Not in the manner of a viral campaign. Not in the manner of a political argument. In the manner of “I read something interesting and I’d like you to read it too.” The committee’s full power is in the slow accumulation of an informed reading public, not in any single dramatic disclosure.