CONFIRMEDthe six-generation line and the historical recordINFERENCEwhat the standing means in this case
The Joseph Smith Papers (person entry and primary documents); Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life’s Review (1947); the research pages of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy (Brian C. Hales); Find a Grave memorials 9271792, 30195041, 62434318 and 62342245; a published 2025 family obituary, on file with this site; Utah Division of Corporations entity No. 10197496-0160; BAM Franchising, Inc. disclosure documents, 2024–2026 editions. The takeover record is in the Keizer file; the complaint record is in The takedown.
Joshua Aaron Johnson is the man BAM’s own filings place inside the company that seized a franchisee’s store and inside the “independent” buyer that took the store over, and the man whose police complaint opened the American Fork file against the journalist covering it. He is also, six public records up his father’s line, family to Joseph Smith. Two of his third-great-grandaunts, Delcena and Almera Johnson, were plural wives of Joseph Smith, which makes the Prophet, in the plain language of kinship, his third-great-granduncle by marriage, twice over. His third-great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Johnson, held Joseph Smith’s power of attorney, sat on his confidential Council of Fifty, and is described in Latter-day Saint historical sources, and in his own memoir, as a private secretary to the Prophet. The relation is by marriage and by service, not blood descent from Joseph Smith, and every rung of it sits on a public record.
The join at the bottom of the ladder is the ordinary public-records kind. BAM’s disclosure documents and the buyer’s company filings identify the Josh Johnson in this case. The published 2025 obituary of his brother, Jeremiah Lyle Johnson, lists Joshua and his wife Kaylee among the survivors and names their father, Lyle Glade Johnson. Utah’s registry carries the same husband-and-wife pair as the members of Johnsons’ Enterprises LLC. And the memorial records carry the line from Lyle Glade Johnson up to Benjamin Franklin Johnson, one named son at a time.
The upper end of the line is not rank-and-file pioneer stock. It is documented, in the church’s own scholarly edition of Joseph Smith’s papers, at the founder’s elbow. On April 10, 1843, Joseph Smith signed a power of attorney appointing Benjamin F. Johnson his agent. On March 26, 1844, Johnson was admitted to the Council of Fifty, the confidential governing council Smith organized in his final months. Latter-day Saint historical sources, and Johnson’s own memoir My Life’s Review, describe him as a private secretary to Joseph Smith. After the migration he founded Santaquin in 1852, and he died at Mesa in 1905, a patriarch of the church’s Arizona colonies.
The marriages sit in the same record. Delcena Didamia Johnson, Benjamin’s eldest sister and the widow of Lyman Sherman, became a plural wife of Joseph Smith by the middle of 1842; Benjamin’s own account places the marriage before his return to Nauvoo that July. Almera Woodard Johnson, another sister, was sealed to Smith in April 1843, in a ceremony performed by William Clayton at Delcena’s home with Hyrum Smith present; Almera swore out an affidavit to the marriage in 1883. The following month, Benjamin’s memoir records, Smith stayed two days at his house at Ramus, Illinois, lodging with Almera “as man and wife.” The instruction Smith delivered during that same May 16–17, 1843 visit was later canonized and stands in the church’s scripture today as Doctrine and Covenants 131. The marriages made Joseph Smith the brother-in-law of Joshua Aaron Johnson’s third-great-grandfather, twice over. They also fix the living man’s own place on the tree, because the husband of a grandaunt is a granduncle: Joseph Smith married two of Joshua Aaron Johnson’s third-great-grandaunts, so the complainant in the American Fork file is, by marriage, Joseph Smith’s third-great-grandnephew, doubly, once through Delcena and once through Almera. Another brother, Joel Hills Johnson, wrote the hymn “High on the Mountain Top,” which the church still sings; its own choir performed it at the October 2025 general conference.
The modern half of this page is already documented on this site. BAM’s own disclosure documents list Josh Johnson as a franchise seller in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions, before and after the November 2024 store seizure. He is BAM’s franchise recruiter, the co-owner, with BAM’s repossession inspector Brandon Best, of the “independent third-party buyer” that took over the seized business, and the man who filed the police complaint that seeded the American Fork arrests and search warrant. He is now a plaintiff, alongside BAM and its officers, in the federal suit against the journalist who reported it. The record for each of those statements is walked, document by document, in the Keizer file and The takedown.
And the standing is not only inherited. It is current, and it is on the government’s own recordings CORROBORATED. In the released body-camera footage of the doorstep interview in American Fork case 26AF02007, roughly fifteen minutes in, Johnson tells the officer in his own words: “I’m on my high council.” A stake high council is the twelve-man body that assists a stake presidency in governing a stake, a group of Latter-day Saint congregations; it is a seat of ordained trust in exactly the community this page describes. An independent Latter-day Saint commentary channel has discussed the calling, and has aired the claim that Johnson has since been released from it ASSERTED; that claim rests on a single unnamed source, the church does not publish such changes, and this site has not verified it. The lineage is the new fact; the roles, and the council seat in his own words, are the established ones.
One scene on the released footage reads differently once the lineage is on the table. In March 2026, a young Latter-day Saint man appeared at Johnson’s door, said he was “from the Second Harbor Ward,” and said he was “trying to clear things up” for Johnson’s own bishop: a member at the doorstep, invoking the bishop, asking a fellow member where he stood. He was a real member of the church. Johnson’s answer is its own record. He told the visitor “we don’t have a Second Ward.” The Harbor 2nd Ward is a current congregation of the church in American Fork itself, on the church’s own meetinghouse locator, in the same town where Johnson told the officer he sits on the high council. He wondered aloud, twice, how the visitors had found his own bishop’s name. And the officer’s report then hardened the false denial into an official fact, printing that the young man had claimed a ward “(which did not exist).”
▶Watch · AFPD body camera · March 9, 6:47 PM · the doorstep exchange
Set that doorstep against the top of the line. Benjamin Franklin Johnson’s house was one Joseph Smith stayed in for days at a time; scripture was recorded under its roof. A hundred and eighty years later, a member of the same church stood at his third-great-grandson’s door with a question about faith and standing, and the answer he got was that the congregation next door does not exist.
This site maps the enterprise as a web of kinship and affinity, because that web is how the enterprise recruits, staffs, and vouches for itself. In that world a family line like this one is working capital. It is what lets a man be read on sight as safe, vouched for, disinterested, and the case record shows the disinterested presentation doing real work: an “independent” buyer for a seized store, a neutral crime victim for a police file. The symmetry across the line is worth stating plainly. The third-great-grandfather sat on the founder’s private council; the complainant, in the same weeks his complaint opened the file, told officers he sat on a stake high council. Council seat to council seat, across a hundred and eighty years. The line documents the standing behind the presentation. It does not document conduct. Being Benjamin Franklin Johnson’s descendant is not an act, and this page draws no inference against any ancestor or against the church as an institution; the claim is about specific living people and the standing they inherited, nothing wider. The asymmetry inside the buyer pair is still worth stating plainly. Brandon Best, the other half, has no comparable line: six documented generations on both sides, and no church office in any of them. The inherited standing sits with the man in the complainant’s chair, not with the man who signed the incorporation papers at the exposed edge.
In fairness, and this limit is the point: no one chooses ancestors. Benjamin F. Johnson practiced plural marriage and left one of the largest posterities in the church; his living descendants number in the thousands, and descent from him is common across the Intermountain West. By itself it says nothing about any person who carries it. Nothing here alleges that any Johnson ancestor did anything wrong, and nothing here is a claim about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The relation to Joseph Smith runs through his marriages to two Johnson daughters and through Benjamin’s service, not through blood descent. Every person named keeps the presumption of innocence.
The man presented as an arm’s-length buyer and a neutral complainant is six public records from Joseph Smith’s own household, and through his two grandaunts’ marriages he is the Prophet’s nephew, twice over. Every record is public. This page walks them.
Sources. The Joseph Smith Papers: person entry, Benjamin F. Johnson (born July 28, 1818, Pomfret, New York; parents Ezekiel Johnson and Julia Hills; admitted to the Council of Fifty March 26, 1844); Power of Attorney to Benjamin F. Johnson, 10 April 1843; Instruction, 16 May 1843. Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life’s Review (1947). Joseph Smith’s Polygamy (Brian C. Hales): Almera Woodard Johnson; Delcena Didamia Johnson. Find a Grave memorials 9271792, 30195041, 62434318 and 62342245. Published obituary of Jeremiah Lyle Johnson (Goff Mortuary, Midvale, Utah, 2025; also on file with this site). American Fork Police report and body-camera footage, case 26AF02007 (the doorstep exchange on the watch page); the church’s meetinghouse locator entry for the Harbor 2nd Ward. Utah Division of Corporations, Johnsons’ Enterprises LLC, entity No. 10197496-0160 (the registry does not support stable deep links; search by name or number). BAM Franchising, Inc. Franchise Disclosure Documents, 2024–2026 editions. American Fork Police released body-camera footage, case 26AF02007 (the complainant’s own statement of his high-council calling); Mormonish Podcast on the same calling. The takeover record: the Keizer file. The complaint record: The takedown. The wider web: The family and the map.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam