[32] Orson Pratt was an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a professor at University of Nauvoo in Illinois.

After Orson trekked to what is now Utah, he served, among other offices, as the LDS Church Historian and Recorder 1874–1881 and also established the basis for the LDS Church's genealogical endeavors.

[36] The association was chartered by its founder, Orson Pratt (in statement appended to the meticulous family genealogical data he had collected) "to collect and register therein, from generation to generation, the dates of births, marriages, places of residence and deaths of all the descendants of my four brothers and myself.

It is to be hoped that all our posterity of whatever branch or name will be sufficiently interested to preserve their genealogy to the latest generation.

[44] According to the association, as of 2011 it possessed a computer database with 32,000 descendants of Jared Pratt and Charity Dickinson, believed to be half-complete.