Lyn Smith Gregory
We Were Smiths

A Royal Mormon Legacy

I am the first descendant of Joseph Smith's family to publicly break ranks and reveal the truth about our famed ancestor and the origins of the Mormon faith.

I left the Church my family founded. And in doing so, I had to leave Utah and my family, too.
My bloodline connects back through four generations to Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Smith, was Joseph Smith's younger brother and was the designated heir to leadership of the church when an angry mob murdered Joseph Smith in 1844.

But Samuel never led. Brigham Young's henchmen poisoned him in an ambitious struggle for succession. Samuel died just weeks after his brother from “an unknown illness,” and Brigham Young became the next prophet, radically changing the future of the Mormon Church.

These secrets, and others like them, are revealed in my memoir, We Were Smiths.

But this book is not just my story of leaving my faith. It's the revelation of a family's unraveling—the undoing of generations of devout reverence, triggered by my sister's and my departure from The Church after discovering the truth about Joseph Smith's deceptions.

We Were Smiths chronicles our journey through our family's fracturing and scattering, and the quest to redefine what "family" means when truth is told, when legacy becomes toxic, when belonging requires silence.

It's an unflinching look into a family torn apart by secrets, dysfunction, and exile—the cost of a legacy that demands perfection and punishes honesty.

But it's also a story of what comes after the breaking. The light that finds its way through the cracks. The unexpected freedom. The hard-won compassion. The ability to be present in ways I never was before. And a path to fragile family re-connection.

My memoir is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Tragic and timely, as thousands exit the Mormon Church and experience both trauma and estrangement.

"Like memoirs such as Martha Beck's Leaving the Saints and Tara Westover's Educated, We Were Smiths mines the emotional territory of religion, identity, family bonds, and survivorship."

I'll always be Lyn Smith Gregory. Still the great-great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith's younger brother, Samuel. Still carrying that complicated inheritance.

But I'm also someone new, and still in the process of becoming all of me. Someone who understands that the opposite of Mormon isn't enlightened ex-Mormon, it's just human.

I’m currently wrapping up my memoir and hope to submit to publishers this year. To be notified when it becomes available, please sign up for my newsletter: Heretic Survivor: From Mormon to Me.