Laura Anderson and the Lost Muster Rolls: Finding the Mormon Battalion’s Forgotten Military Records in the National Archives (2015–2021)

For generations, the official military records of the Mormon Battalion — the muster and payroll rolls that documented each soldier's service on a bimonthly basis — were thought to be lost. Historians had worked primarily from Church rosters, personal journals, and Daniel Tyler's 1881 history. But the U.S. Army's own documentation, the records that would show exactly who served, when they were sick, when they were detached, and when they were discharged, had seemingly vanished.

Laura Anderson, executive director of the Mormon Battalion Association, heard a rumor that the muster records might be in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. She went looking.

The records were there. They had simply never been identified and retrieved.

Anderson made roughly ten trips to the National Archives, working with staff to locate, access, and photograph the muster rolls, payroll records, bounty land applications, and pension files. These were official U.S. War Department documents — the same kind of records kept for every military unit in the Mexican-American War — that had been filed and largely forgotten for 170 years.

The muster rolls, created every two months throughout the Battalion's service, noted whether each man was present for duty, sick, on detachment, discharged, dead, or had deserted. Cross-referenced with the Church's own rosters and with digitized journal accounts, the records allowed researchers to verify, for the first time, precisely who had been in the Battalion.

One significant find was the confirmation of Peter Fife's service. He had been listed on early Church rosters but later dropped from Battalion lists because he did not appear on the standard military rolls. The muster records and journal cross-references confirmed his service, possibly as a teamster or aide.

Anderson shared her findings at RootsTech 2021, and a recording was made available through FamilySearch.

For Latter-day Saints, the recovery of these records is a quiet kind of miracle: 170 years of silence, and then the documentation of 496 men's sacrifice preserved, intact, waiting in the National Archives for someone with enough faith and determination to go looking.