Lineal succession
Doctrine in the Latter Day Saint movement
Lineal succession was a doctrine of the Latter Day Saint movement, whereby certain key church positions were held by right of lineal inheritance. Though lineal succession is now not commonly used, the offices connected with the practice were the President of the Church and the Presiding Patriarch.
Priesthood
Latter Day Saint scripture teaches that a person may also be called through their lineage, so that they have a legal right to a priesthood office. The Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) teaches that descendants of Aaron have legal right to the priesthood: "And if they be literal descendants of Aaron, they have a legal right to the bishopric, if they are the firstborn among the sons of Aaron." In a revelation recorded by Joseph Smith, recorded in the D&C, he was promised his lineage would have the priesthood: "Therefore, thus saith the Lord unto you, with whom the priesthood hath continued through the lineage of your fathers—For ye are lawful heirs, according to the flesh, and have been hid from the world with Christ in God—Therefore your life and the priesthood have remained, and must needs remain through you and your lineage until the restoration of all things spoken by the mouths of all the holy prophets since the world began."
One who has the right and calling to hold these positions through lineage must still be ordained by the church hierarchy before officiating in the office.
Church president
During his lifetime, Smith was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. At the time of Smith's death in 1844, most Latter Day Saints agreed that his older brother, Hyrum, would have been Smith's successor, had he not also been killed. Another likely successor was Smith's younger brother, Samuel, who died less than one month later. A few asserted that the last surviving Smith brother, William, should become church president, and William made that claim for a time and gathered a small faction of followers around him.
Many Latter Day Saints believed that a son of Joseph Smith should be the successor to the church presidency. Several prominent leaders asserted that a patriarchal blessing given to Smith's eldest son, Joseph Smith III, designated the boy to succeed his father.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lineal succession” as doctrine in the Latter Day Saint movement. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as doctrine in the Latter Day Saint movement. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6553380. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1844.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lineal succession” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.