The LDS church was founded in April 1830 by Joseph Smith, who said that 10 years earlier God and Jesus appeared to him in a vision as he prayed in the woods near Palmyra, N.Y. He later said an angel, Moroni, led him to a buried set of gold plates inscribed with the story of a lost tribe of Israel that had settled North America. Smith's translation of the plates became known as the Book of Mormon, the faith's foundational text.

Today the church has a reported 12 million members in more than 26,600 congregations around the world. The Book of Mormon is available in 185 different languages, and some 59,000 missionaries are working around the world.

At times, President Hinckley seems an unlikely church leader.

By nature, his daughters will attest, he is shy, fiercely private and uncomfortable with praise. But in personality and presence, President Hinckley more than lives up to his title.

He is witty, charming and loves a good round of verbal sparring. He is adept at working — and managing — a room, including the swarm of church public relations officers who hover around him.

In the LDS church, ascending to the presidency comes through a combination of service, level of leadership and longevity — the longer high-ranking leaders live, the more likely they'll get the post.

But the job is not something President Hinckley says he wanted, or even thought much about getting.

"I was an employee," he said. "We don't have any ambition for office in the church. We accept what we are asked to do and give it our very best, but we don't have ambition or aspiration for office."

President Hinckley's children never knew what a mark their father was leaving on the church when they were young, daughters Virginia Pearce and Kathleen Walker say.

"It wasn't until (Dew) wrote the biography that we really found out a lot about what he had been doing," says Pearce, 60. "We just never felt that what he was doing was particularly difficult or meaningful. We were just normal."

Family life was full of laughter and adventure, not heavy with expectations or rules, the women say. As a parent, President Hinckley taught much the way he leads his church, through quiet example.

"He would talk about other people at the dinner table and say 'he's a fine man,' and would talk about the characteristics and attributes of the person, and we would know that these are the things that you value," said Walker, 66, the eldest of the five Hinckley children.

"Nothing in Dad is mass-produced," Pearce said. "I think everything he does, he does because he loves the individual people of the church."

President Hinckley has never fully shaken the shyness he felt as a child, but from the pulpit and among the people of the church President Hinckley is transformed, Pearce and Walker say.