Other aspects of Joseph Smith's family life were also examined Saturday, including his relationship with his father, Joseph Smith Sr., and his preoccupation with binding families together both for time and eternity.

Richard Bushman, emeritus professor of history at Columbia University, said he was asked decades ago by former LDS Church historian Leonard Arrington to write a book detailing Smith's personal struggles and the answers he came up with to resolve them.

After years of examining Smith, he said he has "an inkling of the inner Joseph Smith" on two issues he considered vital: fatherhood and the sealing of families together.

Bushman, who is currently chairman of the advisory committee of the Joseph Smith Papers project at Brigham Young University, will release a widely anticipated book, "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling," this fall, published by Knopf.

He described the relationship between father and son as one of intense loyalty, despite the fact that Smith Sr. was a virtual failure in monetary terms, who lost the family farm in Vermont and a $1,000 inheritance in failed farming ventures. The older Smith assuaged his troubles with alcohol, and while it didn't dismantle his intimate relationships, his drinking caused grief within the family circle, Bushman said.

Yet young Joseph was so loyal to his father that he refrained from joining the Presbyterian Church with his mother, Lucy Mack Smith. Their relationship has often been portrayed as the closer of the two parental ties, yet Bushman said young Joseph felt a special obligation to his father to heal family wounds.

Thus he conceded to use a "seer stone" to help his father dig for buried treasure, despite his own reticence about such a venture, Bushman said. Years later, after the young Smith had told family members of his experiences with heavenly visitors, his father acknowledged his son's divine "gifts should be used for a higher purpose."

When Smith Sr. was baptized, his son was simply overcome with emotion more dramatic than family members had ever seen in him, he said. And when Smith ordained his father as patriarch of the fledgling LDS Church, he gave him a heavenly power above and beyond anything material the older Smith had failed to acquire and pass on to his sons, thus giving the family patriarch a way to bless his family similar to that of Old Testament prophets.