Herbert S. Salisbury recorded that on the day Joseph first carried the plates home from the Hill Cumorah (Sept. 22, 1827), his grandmother Katharine — then a girl of fourteen — was present and personally handled the record:
When he [Joseph] came in the house … he was completely out of breath. She [Katharine] took the plates from him and laid them on the table temporarily, and helped revive him until he got breathing properly, and also examined his hand, and treated it for the bruises on his knuckles.
The same memoir adds that on another occasion, while cleaning in the Smith home, Katharine
saw a package on the table containing the gold plates on which was engraved the story of the Book of Mormon. She … hefted those plates and found them very heavy like gold and also rippled her fingers up the edge of the plates and felt that they were separate metal plates and heard the tinkle of sound that they made.
[This file and undated_herbert-salisbury.md, undated_herbert-salisbury-2.md, and undated_herbert-salisbury-3.md all draw on the same Herbert S. Salisbury source family (the 1945 “Things the Prophet’s Sister Told Me” typescript, The Messenger 1954 reprint, and Mary Salisbury Hancock’s 1954 Saints’ Herald essay “The Three Sisters of the Prophet Joseph Smith”). The CSV row labelled “grandson” is a duplicate attribution of the Herbert Salisbury reminiscences and could reasonably be merged with row 129 in any future cleanup.]