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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

So sad that Blackstone bought ancestry.. newspapers.com is a really nice tool for researchers (and most things that get touched by PE end up enshittified)

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Probably that's why Myheritage started oldnews.com... Although MH was also bought by PE

I suppose I should know this: who owns newspapers.com? What's the connection?

Ancestry owns newspapers.com

A lot of Ancestry.com and AncestryDNA was founded to support the Mormon belief that the LDS church can posthumously baptize ancestors of living individuals into the church under the belief that many deceased individuals were not alive to hear the gospel of Joseph Smith.

Thus the massive data collection effort for historical information like newpaper articles from this century and the last.

I think they stopped doing it. Jewish organizations were absolutely livid once they found out they were baptizing Holocaust victims.

It is a pretty important aspect of Latter Day Saint theology. They still do it but officially you can only baptize your own family members with the permission of surviving family members. These guidelines are not always followed. Additionally they have said they removed people from their rosters that were improperly baptized but the members I have talked with are skeptical and found it a bit laughable that the church removing a name from a database would somehow undo a sacred ritual.

When I remove records from databases I follow the sacred ritual of BEGIN TRANSACTION…COMMIT;

That's one good case where it would be the moral thing to name a kid Robert'); DROP TABLE Baptized;--

On the topic of laughability, I would propose that "invoking a dead stranger's name in a self-significant ritual" is absurd to do, and also absurd to be offended by.

I hereby grant permission for my name to be invoked in all rituals, sacred and profane, by all current and future living persons. And I'll laugh at you in advance.

Que sera, sera

Whatever will be, will be

The future's not ours to see

Que sera, sera

And so it begins..

I'll be recommending this for page one of the hymnal.

I mean I’d see that as an invitation to help myself to anything the church owns that isn’t nailed down.

Can you show damages? If you can win a lawsuit here that would be great, paving the way for sueing Christians for their passive aggressive 'I'll pray for you' nonsense would be amazing.

If you are in Salt Lake go check out the computers in the big fancy temple temple there, they used to help you research ancestry stuff. Though all that could have been because we were there on some sort of VIP thing and it might not be open to the public. Interesting side, it's missionaries there that help you. Only instead of young men shipped out into the world, it was attractive young women on missionary to the temple from all over the world.

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