After Joseph Smith was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in 1844, the movement he had founded fourteen years earlier had no settled process for choosing a successor. Most members eventually followed Brigham Young, one of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, on the migration to the Great Salt Lake Valley that built the Utah based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Other members refused to follow Young, rejecting both his claim to succession and the introduction, under his leadership, of plural marriage and expanded temple rites they regarded as departures from Joseph Smith's own teaching.
These smaller, scattered groups spent more than a decade without unified leadership until 1860, when several reorganized around Joseph Smith III, the founder's eldest son, who had stayed in Illinois and had publicly declined any part in plural marriage. The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as the body became known, insisted it represented the original church as Joseph Smith had left it: monogamous, without the fully developed temple endowment ceremony, and governed by a lineal succession of the presidency through the Smith family, a pattern that continued for four generations until 1996.
The RLDS church moved its headquarters to Independence, Missouri, a site with deep significance in Joseph Smith's original revelations as a location for the city of Zion, and built its identity there across the twentieth century as a distinct, comparatively liberal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement. In 2001 the church adopted a new name, Community of Christ, closing a decades long re-examination of its own theology and completing its separation from the Utah church with which it is often confused.