The Mormon Outmigration Leadership History Project was established in the mid-1980s in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University. It was later transferred to the Marriott School of Management, where it remained until the project was completed in 2007.

The project worked to collect oral histories and other documentation about Mormons that migrated out of Utah and took up leadership roles in business and communities elsewhere in the United States. The project was administered by G. Wesley and Marian Ashby Johnson.

G. Wesley Johnson was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He received his Bachelor's with honors from Harvard, and his Master's and PhD from Colombia. He has served on the staff of the Hoover Institution and on the faculties of Stanford and University of California, Santa Barbara before coming to BYU. He has served as editor of several national publications, including The Public Historian Quarterly published by the University of California Press. He directed the Graduate Public History Program at UC Santa Barbara, and was head of the Family and Community History Center at Brigham Young University. He has published books on European, African, and American history, including two works on his home town, Phoenix, and (with his wife, Marian) an official centennial history of Utah. He has received major grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, Social Science Research Council, and National Endowment for the Humanities. He and Marian have been consultants on business history and biographical projects for several Fortune 500 companies.

Marian Ashby Johnson is from Provo, Utah. She received her Bachelor's degree from BYU, and her Master's and PhD degrees from Stanford. She has been Assistant Dean at Santa Barbara City College, Director of the Oral History Program at University of California, Santa Barbara, and Associate Director of the Women's Research Institute at Brigham Young University. She served on the BYU faculty, and taught courses on oral history, history of world civilization, and on her special research area, West Africa. Her focus has been on art history and in particular the study of African gold jewelry. She has had grants from the Rockefeller, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Stanford, and the Kennedy Center of BYU, and was an invited lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kennedy Presidential Library, etc. She has also managed the historical consulting firm of Ashby & Johnson, working on business history projects, oral histories, and family biographies. She and her husband have four children and eleven grandchildren.