Mormons: Bringing In the Ancestors

Twenty miles southeast of Salt Lake City, the buff granite cliffs surrounding Little Cottonwood Canyon are broken by barred, concrete-framed tunnel openings. Behind the bank-vault doors with in, protected by a temperature that remains almost constant near 57 °F., and a humidity that hovers between 40% and 50%, is the world’s largest collection of family records: more than 650,000 rolls of microfilm carrying more than 500 million pages of genealogical statistics going back as far as the 14th century. Only the direct hit of a nuclear bomb could endanger them.

Owner of the vaults is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is centered in Salt Lake City, Mormons keep voluminous records and make full use of the vaults because of a little-known but highly important role that genealogy plays in their religion. In Salt Lake City this month the Mormons sponsored the first World Conference on Records, which drew some 8,000 genealogists, archivists and others from 46 countries around the world.

Proxy Baptism. Mormon interest in genealogy stems from the religion’s status as a recent or “latterday” faith. Christ’s Gospel, in Mormon belief, was lost in ancient times through man’s wickedness and was not restored until Joseph Smith received his golden plates from the Angel Moroni in upstate New York in 1823. But the acceptance of the “restored Gospel,” and baptism in the True Church that proclaimed it, was considered necessary to earn the highest reward after the resurrection, the “celestial kingdom.” Some way, then, had to be found to bring into that kingdom those ancestors who had lived while the Gospel was unavailable, or who otherwise had not received the Mormon message while on earth.

Mormons found the solution in St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 15:29, where the apostle asks, “Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?” Many Biblical scholars think that Paul was merely mentioning a practice of some early Christians to illustrate the Christian belief in resurrection, but the Mormons took the passage as a mandate. As a result, Mormons today not only baptize, marry, and “seal for time and eternity” living family members to one another, but perform these and other ordinances for dead family members who did not undergo them while they lived. Any male church member may be a stand-in for a male ancestor; any female church member for a female ancestor —and “ancestors” need not even be directly related. But first the ancestors must be found, and each church member is charged with tracing his own antecedents, collecting their names and putting them in temple records.

This philosophy led the Mormon Church in 1894 to establish its own Genealogical Society. The society has a large library (90,000 volumes on open stacks, 250 microfilm reading machines) open to the public in Salt Lake City, plus the microfilm operation at Little Cottonwood Canyon. It employs 550 people, spends $5,000,000 a year and is filming old records in 17 countries, producing 400,000 ft. of microfilm every month. During this month’s conference on records, Utah Republican Senator Wallace F. Bennett, himself a Mormon, proposed that the collection become the nucleus of a worldwide “records bank” where the vital statistics of all nations might be microfilmed and stored.

Despite the interest of the non-Mormons at the conference (some 40% of the 8,000 attending), the Mormon concern with genealogy and record keeping is still resolutely religious. Indeed, some Mormons are so eager to give everyone a chance for the celestial kingdom that they troop regularly to their nearest temple to perform the ordinances for random names of those on the temple records who are not yet sealed into the church—much the way pious Catholics pray for “forgotten” souls in purgatory.

The mighty are also watched after. The Mormons have been careful to perform the ordinances for all dead U.S. Presidents. They also claim to have sealed into the church the entire royal houses of Great Britain, France, Germany—and quite possibly, because the Italian records are also thorough, even a few Popes. This does not mean that William the Conqueror and Charlemagne are necessarily Mormons; the dead are still free to accept or reject the Gospel in their spiritual state, though earthly ordinances may have been completed for them.