IT’S been a big month for Merseyside’s Mormons.

April has seen members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) celebrate Jesus’s birthday (it’s on the 6th), welcome famous church member Jimmy Osmond to the Empire, and mark the 179th anniversary of their founding.

Today, the Liverpool Daily Post reveals how deep their roots run in the city and why Merseyside is more Mormon than Salt Lake City.

It was in July, 1837, that the first Mormon missionaries (Mormon is actually a nickname not used by church members) came to Liverpool aboard the merchant vessel, The Garrick.

The ship broke the record for a trans-Atlantic crossing with a journey time of 18 days and 18 hours (and won a $10,000 bet doing so, though you can bet the missionaries didn’t get involved in that).

Just seven years earlier, their Prophet, Joseph Smith Jnr, had set up the Mormon church in America, having revealed that he had been visited by God and Jesus, and an American angel called Moroni.

He said he had been led to a set of gold plates and from them translated The Book of Mormon, a secret history of a Jewish family which left Jerusalem around 600BC and went to America, becoming Christians.

It would become the LDS’s third testament. Back in 1837, the missionaries, led by Heber C Kimball, disembarked in Liverpool, just then becoming one of the dominant ports in the world, seven men who went on to convert 2,000 people in the next eight months, and more than 42,000 by 1850.

They set up branches of the church in Preston and the Ribble Valley, and baptised their first European converts in the River Ribble, near Preston.