Family History Research

The Latter-day Saint investment in genealogy is not antiquarian and it is not sentimental. It follows from two doctrines held together. The first is that the ordinances required for the highest degree of glory can be performed by proxy for a person who died without them. The second is that a family can be sealed together permanently. Neither can be done for an ancestor who cannot be identified, so finding names, dates and relationships is a religious duty with a defined purpose.

The apparatus built on that premise is without parallel. The Genealogical Society of Utah was founded in 1894. From 1938 the church began microfilming parish registers, civil registrations, probate records and archives, an effort that eventually reached more than a hundred countries and produced a collection stored since 1965 in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a facility cut into the granite of Little Cottonwood Canyon southeast of Salt Lake City. Digitisation has since moved most of it online through FamilySearch, which is free to anyone, member or not, and does not require registration with the church. National archives in several countries that could not have afforded to digitise their own holdings did so in partnership with the church on those terms.

The practice runs from the vault down to the ward. Congregations hold family history consultants, temples maintain lists of names awaiting ordinances, and a teenager attending the temple to perform baptisms for the dead is often doing so for names their own family submitted.

The practice has drawn one serious and sustained objection, and the church has had to answer it more than once. Because proxy ordinances are performed for the dead without any consent from the dead or their descendants, names have been submitted for people whose families regard the act as an intrusion, and the sharpest case has been the posthumous baptism of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The issue became public in the early 1990s when researchers found hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims in the church's ordinance records. In 1995 the church reached an agreement with Jewish organisations to remove those names and to restrict submissions to a member's own direct ancestors or to people for whom the closest living relative had given permission. The agreement was breached repeatedly in the years that followed, by individual members rather than by policy, and further undertakings were given in 2010 after the names of Simon Wiesenthal's parents and others appeared. The church has since built technical restrictions into its submission system, and its published policy is now explicit: submit only your own family.

The problem is structural rather than accidental. A church that teaches proxy ordinance for the dead and that has assembled the world's largest index of the dead has, by construction, both the motive and the means, and the restraint has to be imposed by rule. That the church has repeatedly had to reimpose it says something about how strong the underlying religious motive is among its members.