Isn’t it every child’s dream to discover a lost treasure that peeks into the past? Daniel Larsen may have done just that. In 1992 Larsen’s mother, Lois Smith Larsen, daughter of Frederick Madison Smith, RLDS Church President, and son of Joseph Smith III, bequeathed him some family heirlooms. One was a pocket watch with a Joseph Smith III monogram. The second was a similar but smaller locket. The locket was gold plated, about 1 ½”, and had a jammed mechanism. He secured these in a safe for later perusal.
In 2020, he came across the keepsake items and grew curious. This time he forced open the locket and discovered a picture, a daguerreotype. Larsen said, “I looked at it and I looked at it and saw those eyes. I told my wife to come in and look at this. We looked at it and…almost at the same time said, ‘This is a photo of Joseph Smith.’” quoted from Trent Toone’s article “Does an image of Joseph Smith exist? What one descendant found in a forgotten family heirloom” in the Deseret News.
Dan Larsen then emailed a photo of the image to his nephew, Lachlan Mackay, avid historian and Community of Christ Apostle. Mackay shared the image with the Community of Christ historian and archivist Ron Romig, and they began to investigate the provenance and possibility that the daguerreotype could be the earliest image of Joseph Smith. They spent the next two years working to authenticate the daguerreotype before their public announcement.
To view details of the authentication process (expert analysis, historical research, facial recognition software, forensic artist & overlays and cutaways): and to see pictures, see: