LaJean Purcell Carruth is the shorthand editor for Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. She is a professional transcriber of 19th- and early 20th-century documents written in Pitman and Taylor shorthands and in the Deseret Alphabet at the Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. Over the past forty years, she has transcribed Mormon and Quaker sermons, minutes, legislative proceedings, court proceedings, journals, letters, and other items. She has repeatedly presented scholarly papers on her work at such academic venues as the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Mormon History Association, and the Communal Studies Association, and her transcriptions have been published in BYU Studies as well as online and have been quoted in numerous books and articles. She holds master’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Library and Information Science (1974) and Humanities (1978), and a Ph.D. in German from the University of Utah (1988).