The Mormon Church Is Building a Family Tree of the Entire Human Race
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
My uncle works for a company that creates archives of newspapers and licenses them to libraries, universities, etc. They had purchased the rights to millions of newspapers dating back to the civil war, but lacked the manpower to convert all of the microfiche into digital copies, and in turn have those digital copies indexed. The Mormon Church provides a massive labor force of people who are now digitizing the content for free, simultaneously making those records available to the public who hold subscriptions to that particular service and making them available for free to members of the Mormon Church. Through deals like this and over hundreds of years the Church has built the most impressive family history library known to mankind.
As a Mormon, I was required to know and research family history growing up, and am encouraged frequently to do so now. I just finished beta testing an iOS app called "family search" that the Church is building, allowing anyone to add pictures, video, stories, etc. of their ancestors. In doing so you run into people you are related to who are doing the same work, and learn thing about your roots you never would have known. It's fascinating, though I'm by no means a family history buff.
I think it's mostly been done by eager genealogists paid by rich noblemen and kings to trace their lineage back to Adam. If you can find your relationship to royalty, then you can usually find a path back to Adam.
I imagine a family tree for our entire species that also included DNA would be medically quite useful. Some day, perhaps.
(And this distinction is completely orthogonal to the question of whether same-sex couples get the right to be legally recognized as a couple or parents.)
I imagine that over time, any purported complete genealogy will make those distinctions but come to include information about both.
While both people in a same sex couple cannot claim parentage on the same child, one parent can. With multiple children each partner could claim parentage on one child, but not the other. This is not different than a 2nd marriage where each hetero partner can claim parentage on only 1 child.
In fact, in many instances you would not model "birth of couple X" but "person A and person B were married between years ...", "person C has father B and mother D".
Exactly because re-marriages and adultery, and children born out of wedlock has always been common (and known), so even if dealing with same sex couples is a reasonably new thing, dealing with children where linking their parentage to a specific couple is nothing new.
Of course, the practice of lying about family history is equally old, so in practice most genealogy becomes unreliable very quickly. In my own family tree, we have a child who in official registers is listed as having a mother we have lots of further data on, and the father is listed as a "Friedrich Denneche, travelling hat-maker from Bremen".
Problem is at the time (early 1800's I think), everyone had to register with local police when entering Oslo, and there is no record of any travelling hat-maker from Bremen. Nor did my dad find any records in Germany (though it's possible that there would be guild-records he did not find, he never got a chance to spend much time looking at German records) that matched.
His theory, which of course can't be proven, was that the real dad was the mothers brother-in-law. Especially as he took her in and later adopted the child and she lived with him and his wife (talk about awkward situation if my dads theory is true...). But at the time this happened, sexual relations between in-laws was legally considered incest in Norway, and it was a crime not to list the father on the birth certificate, and a crime to lie on it, so if the theory is true she was in a bind: she had to put down a father, but could not put down the real father without even worse problems, and could not put down someone who might find out and object. Inventing a person nobody would expect to be able to find would have been a safe way out.
Yes there is. Many countries have gender recognition laws which trans people to legally recognised as their true gender. A person can be genetically decended from two women.
And while people recognize adoption, they often care more about their blood relatives. Hence, the proliferation of Y-chromosome and mtDNA genetic genealogy.
I don't know of about all possibilities, but the following are examples I know of personally.
1.) One of my friends has a daughter. He came from a very conservative family, married, had a child, then finally had a conversation with his wife explaining his situation. He's gay, in a relationship and has contributed to the world's family tree.
2.) Lesbian couple. Both wanted kids, so a friend of theirs (straight) contributed sperm. So, one of the partners has definitely contributed to the world's family tree.
There's nothing morally wrong or right about this statement, it's just a mathematical property of a very particular social graph.
There are definitely uses for a genetic only tree, eg for medicine.
Family trees also work sideways. If someone's brother marries a man, then that other man is the uncle to that person's children.
This project is impressive in its comprehensiveness, and I'm glad an organization has undertaken it. Still, the discriminatory, homophobic dogmas of the LDS church cannot be ignored, and criticism of these beliefs should not be discouraged. Only through discourse can they be challenged and obsoleted. The sooner that happens, the better.
I wouldn't criticise the Catholic healthcare system, it has helped too many people for that.
The idea that doing good makes you immune to criticism for doing bad is particularly pernicious. Certainly, good that an institution has done and continues to do (especially insofar as it seems to indicate a generally positive intent) might shape the form and tone of any criticism of a bad thing it does, it shouldn't prevent such criticism altogether.
"Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format. The LDS drove microfilm technology in the twentieth century, and today it is a leader in digital data storage. Its digital camera operators photograph records and get those images online within two days, and then an enormous army—that is to say, hundreds of thousands—of volunteers index the files and make them searchable. The Mormons were crowdsourcing long before the word was invented."
For them, recording a same-sex couple - disregarding that they don't agree with it - serves no purpose.
So their project certainly is no replacement for a secular genealogical database, but it is still a fantastic source of data (my very-much atheist dad made extensive use of their services - he was able to get microfilm copies of Norwegian church books sent from Utah to the Mormon church in Oslo with much less effort than getting hold of copies of the records in Norway - in most cases the alternative would be to travel around the country to visit the specific churches and go through the actual paper copies)
Also makes me wonder how an adopted person constructs a family tree.
It wouldn't at all surprise me that this eventually changes. If you look at the history, you will notice that their beliefs have changed in several significant ways over their history.
As a side note, since my ancestors came to America in the 1850s, there has been at least one person in each generation that is very interested in family history. The effort got a boost when my uncle became Mormon shortly after he started his family. (An event not without controversy in the family.) The resources available for genealogy research as a result of this work are quite staggering.
1) Was there any bowdlerization of the records--any attempt to cover up scandalous lineages that are or were at one time against Mormon norms? (For example, interracial relationships prior to 1978)
2) Are they able to handle cyclical family trees, such as described in this famous stack overflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/q/6163683/67591
Heh, this reminds me of an assignment in a Finnish university. A second-year programming course requires to build a family tree parser with the appropriate data structure design.
The tests are automated: students upload their sources through a web form, the backend builds the code and feeds it a number of test cases. The trick is that the inputs are not provided ahead of time. Once a test set fails, the student is provided with the input(s) that broke their submission. A student can submit their code at most four times, and a failure to pass the tests also means a failed course.
One of the inputs is the family tree of the Egyptian Pharaohs.
Their current software spec for GEDCOM can't even handle same-sex marriage.
GEDCOM is rapidly becoming a poor choice for reflecting current reality.
(b) In places with gender recognition law, someone can legally have their new gender recognised, and hence be legally female or male, and be capable of genetically producing children with someone of the same gender.
You can merge records together into a single individual, but that individual can be split again. As you might expect, there are some family trees where people are constantly fighting over the actual events. It's a bit like wikipedia in that way.
2. Yes, they allow very free-form data in the tree. In previous incarnations they used to try to merge everything together into a single 'true' version of events. Since they now just keep everything, they will try to provide a coherent view of the data, but underneath it's all just individual items of data in a massive database.
Previously, the only goal of the mormon church's genealogy efforts was to perform ordinances in biological relationships - biological parents to child, biological parents to each other. That also matched up with the nuclear family structure of the 50s which the church is also in favor of, so the concepts got a bit mixed.
I'm not involved in the project, but my guess is that their current goal is to make their system the single clearinghouse for all genealogical data. If everyone is using it, then the mormon church will always have access to all the data it needs for the ordinances. Merging different databases is a massive pain, it's much simpler to record everything in the same place. Other people will only use this system if it's flexible enough to meet their needs, so I think that's why it's more flexible now.
As to 2. That is a super interesting question, I have no idea.
Definitely. I think this is an area where LDS could do better PR.
So many records are completely lost/destroyed during wars over the years, hopefully having proper copies/backups made during this relative lull will prove effective.
But at the same time, they believe that you can effectively baptise your ancestors this way, and that if said ancestors soul accepts the baptism, that's a route to heaven.
So it's not "baptising new members multiple times". It is baptising new members and their ancestors, with the member being a "stand in". They still only have one new member - they obviously have no way of knowing if the ancestors accepted the baptism, and either way they're still dead.
Genealogy basically becomes a route to saving the souls of your ancestors.
No, the baptisms for the dead are not included in the count of members. You have to be living and baptised to be counted, and either die or formally request name removal to be removed.
As far as inaccuracy goes, there are lots of people who don't attend and many who don't self-identify as Mormon counted in the membership rolls. I'd guess active mormons are probably somewhere between 1/4 to 1/2 of what's reported.
From a scriptural sense, the practice is actually based on the concept of modern revelation, where we believe that God has revealed the practice and how it works through modern-day prophets, as was done in the past. The Corinthians scripture ("misinterpretation" is rather open to interpretation) is used simply to point out an instance where it was probably practiced in the churches at the time of Paul.
A living Mormon is baptized in the name of the dead person. This is only done once for a deceased person, which is one of the reasons for the huge record keeping project. The deceased who are baptized are not added the Church roles. Mormons believe that the deceased has the choice to accept or reject the baptism. I am a Mormon, so feel free to ask me any other questions you have.