If you ever want to write the history of your family and your ancestors, then you will have to face many difficulties that only genealogists understand. Genealogy is the discipline that studies genealogy. Perhaps most of all, the uninitiated person will be surprised by the fact that the most serious genealogists in the world are American Mormons. They have collected the most numerous database of dead people on the planet.
Who are Mormons
The Mormon movement was founded by the American Joseph Smith Jr. two centuries ago. He called Mormon a certain prophet who lived on the American continent in the 4th century, even before the colonization of America by Europeans. According to him, the prophet wrote his religious revelations on gold plates, and Smith, in turn, thanks to the tip of an angel, discovered these plates and translated the sacred text into English.
Joseph Smith Jr. and His Followers.
This is how the Book of Mormon was born - the foundation of Mormon teachings. Basically, the doctrine resembles the Protestant trends in Christianity - Mormons recognize the foundations of the Christian faith and honor the Bible. However, Smith's significant additions prevent Mormons from being considered Christians.
Families First
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It was thanks to Smith's ideas that the largest group of Mormons united in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage for many decades. As a result, this caused a series of conflicts with the authorities of the United States, and in the late 19th century, the Mormon church backed down, forbidding their men to have multiple wives.
Brigham Young, second president of the Mormon Church, and his wives.
But even without polygamy, the cult of family values among Mormons is very strong. They believe that creating a family is the most difficult, but at the same time, the most essential work that a person must do on Earth. The traditions of family and youth evenings, maintaining connections with close and distant relatives, the desire to have many children - all this contributed to the fact that Mormons began to pay attention to the history of their ancestors.
Baptism of the dead
Another reason that heightened interest in genealogy was the idea of ancestor baptism. In the Mormon church, a living person can mediate the baptism of the dead. The mediator, as expected, is baptized with water, but during the ceremony he must pronounce the name of the deceased person.
Baptismal font in a Mormon church.
Naturally, first of all, Mormons thought about their close relatives and friends, but not only. They managed to "baptize" the presidents and founding fathers of the United States, Christopher Columbus and even Adolf Hitler. From their point of view, they thus give deceased people the opportunity to be saved.
The most painstaking genealogists in the world
Not every person knows in detail the history of his family many generations ago. But the archives try to store information about when a particular citizen was born, when he died, and when he got married. Most often, such records are made by state bodies, and in the past, this was often done by church parishes. It was important for the authorities to know who inhabited the territories under their control, and therefore this data was carefully collected and then deposited on the archive shelves.
Metric book with records of acts of civil status.
To find information about their ancestors, Mormons went to the American archives, and later to other countries. After all, the United States was founded by the descendants of immigrants from Europe and other continents. Mormons do the common cause, not thinking about whether they are looking for ancestors for their church members or for those who later come to them and want to baptize their entire lineage.
Family History Library in Salt Lake City, USA.
The Mormon Church spared no expense in copying birth books, civil registration records, various censuses … Millions of volumes of documents flocked to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City - in this city, the capital of the American state of Utah, the Mormons' headquarters are located.
Digitized database
Modern technologies have made it possible to simplify the collection of genealogical information. Mormons copied archival documents onto microfilms, and from the end of the 20th century, these microfilms began to be scanned and data from them digitized. Digitization work is underway at the Mormon Archives in Granite Mountain, near Salt Lake City. By some estimates, millions of microfilm rolls contain up to three billion genealogical records.
Entrance to the Mormon Archives in Granite Mountain.
Mormons do not seek to lock the accumulated data with a key, so you can get acquainted with their database in specially created "family history centers" around the world. Genealogists and people looking for information about their ancestors go there. Some part of the huge database can be seen on the Internet - gradually the Mormons are putting it out for free. Why go to hard-to-reach archives, if all the work to collect information has already been done?..
Mormon genealogists in Russia
Not all Mormons were able to conduct their research. Often, the public in a particular country was outraged by their idea of baptizing the dead, although the Church of Latter-day Saints does not divulge information about which of the millions of people it has found it leads through the baptism ceremony.
Storage of microfilms in the Mormon archives.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russian archives have become highly accessible to foreign citizens. The Mormons took advantage of this by copying a lot of data from various regions of Russia. But later the archival legislation was tightened, and, in order not to violate the laws of our country, the collected microfilms are not posted on the Internet by Mormons - they can be viewed only in their family history centers (there is one such center in Moscow).
Pre-revolutionary metric book.
The tightening also affected the practice of mass copying of documents containing personal data of people, and therefore not all archives managed to come under the scrutiny of the Mormon movement. For many years they have not been engaged in archival search in Russia.
However, if you are worried that your ancestor may be baptized by Mormons without your desire, and even without his desire, then you should know more about the rite of baptism of the dead. According to Mormon teaching, a deceased person is free to either accept or reject the baptism imposed on him. We can say that even after death, a person always has a choice.