I would be curious to find out how many Americans today have ancestors who lived in America during Civil war. Even more detailed question is with percentages cohorts based on how many ancestors were in America vs somewhere else during that time.
Thing is, only one of those branches was even well-known among my family, the others are all lost history. Out of curiosity I've asked some friends and co-workers and several have said similar things - they don't know when their ancestors immigrated, their personal family history just doesn't go back that far.
The portion of my family tree from the US is about half pre-Civil War, of which most were pre-Revolution. (and my father told me that, while researching, he found the Mormons for some reason have records on way more people than just their adherents. Could be useful)
That’s why they collect lots of genealogical information, world wide (https://www.familysearch.org), so that they can baptize all forefathers of current Mormons.
The baptizing leads to critique, for example when they baptize people of other faiths. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/21/mormons-holoca...:
“Mormons have recently posthumously baptised at least 20 Holocaust victims, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and the Queen Mother, according to a researcher who has spent two decades monitoring the church’s massive genealogical database.”
Would the unbaptized not be in limbo or hell? I'm a bit confused by the mythology of all this - it seems to be offering a lifeline(deathline? spiritline?) out of eternal torture. If you're in heaven, baptism seems irrelevant, or are there levels of heaven? What good is an act of faith when you're literally experiencing the truth of the claims at that very moment?
> What good is an act of faith when you're literally experiencing the truth of the claims at that very moment?
I don't know what kind of information spirits in the spirit world have, but the LDS church teaches that there's some teaching of the gospel still going on in the spirit world, so presumably spirits don't automatically have complete information. The LDS teaching is that baptism is prerequisite for attaining the highest degree of glory, and all spirits have the opportunity in the spirit world to accept baptism by proxy if they did not have an opportunity during their life to be baptized or chose not to be.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_the_unlearned#Latter-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_world_(Latter_Day_Saint...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_of_salvation_(Latter_Day_...
They believe the dead can be baptized, which is a driving force behind their mission trips to other countries - if they convert one person with a very different family tree, they not only save one soul, but they enable all of that person's dead ancestors to make it into heaven as well.
Half of my family, of German Dutch ancestry, dates along the east coast to before the Revolutionary War, and spent the better part of 200 years as farmers in the northern Union Appalachia region (the last generation that were farmers is almost gone now; the family farm land - which isn't very valuable land - has been gradually sold off over the past century; the area is difficult land to farm, it's a rough way of life, and it's nearly impossible to compete with modern corporate farming). The other half came over during one of the large immigration waves toward the end of the 19th century.
My Civil War era ancestors were in Nevada at the time, where we've largely remained since.