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Ancestry.com is possible largely because of the Mormon church. There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they

Ancestry.com is possible largely because of the Mormon church. There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven. To allow Mormons to identify these ancestors the LDS church has spent decades going around the world and making microfilm copies of birth, death and marriage records and the like. At one point when I was doing genealogy research on the East Coast I went to the local Mormon church's family history library and ordered a microfilmed copy of some birth records from the Russian Empire in Yiddish and Russian. I could then go through the microfilm and try to pick out the names I wanted. Because much of the hard part (getting access to these archives and making copies of these records) has already been done, Ancestry just has to scan and OCR these records. My understanding is that Mormon volunteers do a lot of that work as well.

DanBC 14y ago
My father did some of his ancestry research with help from the LDS people at a centre in London. I was wary, expecting a bit of evangelising or conversion talk, but they didn't try any of that stuff. It was interesting that at the time it was one of the best ways to get access to computers and cd rom drives for no cost.
- hnriot 14y ago
  That's interesting that you were surprised that the LDS didn't try any of the usual cult practices of trying to induce you into their fold. Meanwhile, we have a presidential candidate from the same organization... This might not be an issue if if we actually had separation of church and state in this country, but alas that's a myth (despite what people might want to believe, just ask any grade school CHILD what they do first thing in the morning at school, or look at the currency and see who WE trust etc etc.) Regardless of any political view, and I'm not advocating any, I'm just picking up on the view that you had cult-like suspicions of a church organization that is a big part of the life of what might be the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth.
smackfu 14y ago
"just has to scan and OCR" Yeah, just OCR badly hand-written text. That's a hard problem! I've run across matches in the census data that I would consider illegible, but that somehow got matched with the right name.
- BrainScraps 14y ago
  There are thousands of volunteers doing this "mechanical Turk"-like work at a pretty impressive pace. http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progress-indexing-1940-us-census http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progre... Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time. Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-now-available http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n... Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
  - JoblessWonder 14y ago
    Is the data available to outside organizations or is it kept internally with the church?
    - UrLicht 14y ago
      Yes, see https://familysearch.org https://familysearch.org
    - smackfu 14y ago
      Yeah, they have no reason to keep it secret. They are gathering it for their own odd purpose but that doesn't preclude sharing it.
  - UrLicht 14y ago
    Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).
tzs 14y ago
> There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven. That bugs me. I'm afraid of it going down like this. I die, and the Valkyries select me for Valhalla. As I enjoy the afterlife there, knocking back flagons of mead and knocking up wenches, while trading tall tales of valor with the other chosen, there comes a knock at the door. A maiden answers, and then goes to Odin and whispers something. Odin frowns, and whispers something back to her. Now all eyes are on the maiden as she walks back to the door, and invites in two Mormons. She leads them to Odin, and they hand him some paperwork. Odin summons me, and tells me that they are from Mormon Heaven. He tells me that my half great great great great great grand niece has converted to Mormonism, found me in their ancestry records, and baptized me into the Mormon Church--and that I must leave Valhalla and move to Mormon Heaven. No more mead and wenches for me. :-(
- danielweber 14y ago
  Starting with the assumption of an afterlife, this would be a pretty crazy way for it to work. Can another descendant get you transferred back to Valhalla? I understand the offense you can feel at finding out a loved one got baptized post-mortem into a religion they didn't believe in, but if the living could get the dead kicked out of any sort of heaven it would be essentially not be an afterlife.
  - andyjohnson0 14y ago
    I suspect that @tzs was not being entirely serious
    - hkmurakami 14y ago
      But this is how child custody works... =\
      - pyre 14y ago
        If I baptize a child in 'my' religion, then I get custody? Then my ex-spouse baptizes into his/her religion, and custody again changes hands?
shawnee_ 14y ago
There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven Not quite right. Proxy baptism simply allows an individual recipient the opportunity to accept or reject the teachings if they didn't get a chance to learn about them during their lifetime. There's nothing passive or automatic about it.
- hnriot 14y ago
  I fail to appreciate any material difference given that the individual is dead and utterly incapable of accepting or rejecting anything. If you're expecting a non-passive response from these ancestors, I'm afraid the whole endeavour is a total waste of time and energy. See definition of dead for details.
  - resplin 14y ago
    What a silly comment. The idea that proxy baptism for the dead has any effect is predicated on the belief that there is an afterlife and that the individual has the ability to accept or reject the ordinance.
    - stephengillie 14y ago
      Indeed, any act the living take on behalf of the dead is solely for the benefit of the living -- usually for emotional benefit. We are objects, after all, and death returns us to an inanimate state.
      - resplin 14y ago
        I don't think you are appreciating the world view of believing Mormons.
        jamesbritt 14y ago
        He seems to understand it just fine.
dmckeon 14y ago
That the microfilming was accomplished is invaluable - and I understand that the typical offer to various records-keepers from the LDS family history folks was: "We'll pay to microfilm your records, you get a copy to keep, and the LDS gets a copy to use." Win-win. The transcription of records for indexing is also valuable, but less so, given that volunteers were working from projected microfilm copies of (usually) hand-written records (some in beautiful but dated hands). OCR in the 1980s was not adequate, but Soundex indexing helps a lot, and if you need to search a small area exhaustively, you can see many of the microfilm copies of records through a site like ancestry.com or from the digital media available for use at local LDS family history centers. The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard, which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges, and the PAF software package (which now has many competitors.) Note that research into ancestry has an interesting network effect - while people have 2^N N-parents, once N gets over 4 or 5 it can become challenging to trace individuals - but the chances that some other active researcher shares some of those 2^N N-parents start to increase - and ancestry.com has done well at providing links to other researcher's public trees when they become available. This pattern has the effect of encouraging subscribers who have already found most of their ancestors out to level N, for whatever N, to continue to subscribe in hopes of finding a new link from another researcher, or perhaps a new clue in a newly digitized document set. It will be interesting to see how the decreasing cost of genome analysis affects family history research - perhaps helping find distant cousins, or perhaps revealing surprising differences between a presumed history and the biological record.
- rmc 14y ago
  The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard, which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges And of course, since they are bigots, they don't let 2 men be married in their GEDCOM standard, or other non-traditional family structures. Get your politics out of standards.
  - resplin 14y ago
    Calling people bigots does nothing to promote civil discourse about important issues such as homosexual marriage. The standard was drafted in 1984, long before efforts to redefine marriage. It isn't very fair of you to project your 21st century politics back on the creators of a 30 year old standard. You apply the label of bigotry to exclude from the conversation those who differ in opinion from you. That isn't how democracies are designed to function. Nor does it recognize the complexity of the issue. Religious people can desire a standard of public morality without espousing hatred for those who don't share that standard. Calling that bigotry makes it harder to identify true prejudice.
resplin 14y ago
Though Ancestry.com has some agreements to share resources with the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, it is a completely separate organization and a for profit company. It was founded by Mormons, many of the employees are Mormons, and lots of the customers are Mormons and driven by their religious interest; but it is distinct from the work you are discussing. The efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ are all non-profit and publicly available at Family Search (http://familysearch.org http://familysearch.org).
dabent 14y ago
Mormons may have done some of the work to help build out Ancestry.com's database, but they also have built a free competitor: FamilySearch.org From a startup perspective, the base of records is important, but the 1.6 billion dollar purchase came from lots of paying customers who aren't Mormon (there just aren't enough Mormons who are devout to the point where they will pay for a genealogy resource when a free one built by their own faith exists). The Ancestry folks just took a relatively cheap/free pool of data, and did the work necessary to feed that data to customers willing to pay. I'd guess there are a lot more startups that can be built on readily available data sets like this. Congrats to the Ancestry.com team. Edited to add how cool this whole business model is. Something that could be thought of as a "lifestyle business" ended up with a huge win by having the silly ideas of charging customers and building something people wanted. Disclosure: I'm a Mormon.
- computerbob 14y ago
  It seems that the site is down. Would they close "FamilySearch.org" because of the acquisition? Or is this because of AWS?
  - dabent 14y ago
    It's likely server issues. I don't believe the Ancestry.com acquisition will change anything with FamilySearch.
lukeholder 14y ago
for anyone that is interested this verse is used to support the doctrine: http://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/1-cor/15.29?lang=eng#28 http://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/1-cor/15.29?lang=eng#28
SiVal 14y ago
The LDS Church has records that are donated to it by its members and others. It also has an extraordinary collection of microfilmed church records from little churches (of all denominations) from around the globe. These churches are often very sensitive about their records and how they will be used. These records are made available free to any individual who wants to do genealogical research through an LDS Family History Center, but they are NOT made available to commercial organizations such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com, on the other hand, photographs public records such as census documents or licenses private records such as shipping manifests, indexes them, and sells access to the indexes and photos. They are free to resell their data and, by selling the company, that's what they'll be doing. They own the copyrights of the hi-rez photos of old census docs, even though the docs themselves are in the public domain.

DanBC 14y ago

My father did some of his ancestry research with help from the LDS people at a centre in London. I was wary, expecting a bit of evangelising or conversion talk, but they didn't try any of that stuff. It was interesting that at the time it was one of the best ways to get access to computers and cd rom drives for no cost.

hnriot 14y ago
That's interesting that you were surprised that the LDS didn't try any of the usual cult practices of trying to induce you into their fold. Meanwhile, we have a presidential candidate from the same organization... This might not be an issue if if we actually had separation of church and state in this country, but alas that's a myth (despite what people might want to believe, just ask any grade school CHILD what they do first thing in the morning at school, or look at the currency and see who WE trust etc etc.) Regardless of any political view, and I'm not advocating any, I'm just picking up on the view that you had cult-like suspicions of a church organization that is a big part of the life of what might be the next President of the most powerful nation on Earth.

smackfu 14y ago

"just has to scan and OCR" Yeah, just OCR badly hand-written text. That's a hard problem! I've run across matches in the census data that I would consider illegible, but that somehow got matched with the right name.

BrainScraps 14y ago
There are thousands of volunteers doing this "mechanical Turk"-like work at a pretty impressive pace. http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progress-indexing-1940-us-census http://www.lds.org/church/news/volunteers-make-record-progre... Also, the tools created to index these records are created mainly by Mormon developers who donate their time. Interesting story about Mobile apps for indexing: http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-now-available http://tech.lds.org/blog/455-new-familysearch-indexing-app-n... Disclaimer: I'm a big fan and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
- JoblessWonder 14y ago
  Is the data available to outside organizations or is it kept internally with the church?
  - UrLicht 14y ago
    Yes, see https://familysearch.org https://familysearch.org
  - smackfu 14y ago
    Yeah, they have no reason to keep it secret. They are gathering it for their own odd purpose but that doesn't preclude sharing it.
- UrLicht 14y ago
  Mormon developers do not donate their time. https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng https://www.lds.org/church/employment?lang=eng (Must be LDS to browse and apply for jobs, but you can see the heading on the linked page indicating Information Technology jobs are available).

tzs 14y ago

> There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven. That bugs me. I'm afraid of it going down like this. I die, and the Valkyries select me for Valhalla. As I enjoy the afterlife there, knocking back flagons of mead and knocking up wenches, while trading tall tales of valor with the other chosen, there comes a knock at the door. A maiden answers, and then goes to Odin and whispers something. Odin frowns, and whispers something back to her. Now all eyes are on the maiden as she walks back to the door, and invites in two Mormons. She leads them to Odin, and they hand him some paperwork. Odin summons me, and tells me that they are from Mormon Heaven. He tells me that my half great great great great great grand niece has converted to Mormonism, found me in their ancestry records, and baptized me into the Mormon Church--and that I must leave Valhalla and move to Mormon Heaven. No more mead and wenches for me. :-(

danielweber 14y ago
Starting with the assumption of an afterlife, this would be a pretty crazy way for it to work. Can another descendant get you transferred back to Valhalla? I understand the offense you can feel at finding out a loved one got baptized post-mortem into a religion they didn't believe in, but if the living could get the dead kicked out of any sort of heaven it would be essentially not be an afterlife.
- andyjohnson0 14y ago
  I suspect that @tzs was not being entirely serious
  - hkmurakami 14y ago
    But this is how child custody works... =\
    - pyre 14y ago
      If I baptize a child in 'my' religion, then I get custody? Then my ex-spouse baptizes into his/her religion, and custody again changes hands?

shawnee_ 14y ago

There is a religious obligation in Mormonism to proxy baptize one's non-Mormon ancestors so they can get into heaven Not quite right. Proxy baptism simply allows an individual recipient the opportunity to accept or reject the teachings if they didn't get a chance to learn about them during their lifetime. There's nothing passive or automatic about it.

hnriot 14y ago
I fail to appreciate any material difference given that the individual is dead and utterly incapable of accepting or rejecting anything. If you're expecting a non-passive response from these ancestors, I'm afraid the whole endeavour is a total waste of time and energy. See definition of dead for details.
- resplin 14y ago
  What a silly comment. The idea that proxy baptism for the dead has any effect is predicated on the belief that there is an afterlife and that the individual has the ability to accept or reject the ordinance.
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    Indeed, any act the living take on behalf of the dead is solely for the benefit of the living -- usually for emotional benefit. We are objects, after all, and death returns us to an inanimate state.
    - resplin 14y ago
      I don't think you are appreciating the world view of believing Mormons.
      - jamesbritt 14y ago
        He seems to understand it just fine.

dmckeon 14y ago

That the microfilming was accomplished is invaluable - and I understand that the typical offer to various records-keepers from the LDS family history folks was: "We'll pay to microfilm your records, you get a copy to keep, and the LDS gets a copy to use." Win-win. The transcription of records for indexing is also valuable, but less so, given that volunteers were working from projected microfilm copies of (usually) hand-written records (some in beautiful but dated hands). OCR in the 1980s was not adequate, but Soundex indexing helps a lot, and if you need to search a small area exhaustively, you can see many of the microfilm copies of records through a site like ancestry.com or from the digital media available for use at local LDS family history centers. The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard, which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges, and the PAF software package (which now has many competitors.) Note that research into ancestry has an interesting network effect - while people have 2^N N-parents, once N gets over 4 or 5 it can become challenging to trace individuals - but the chances that some other active researcher shares some of those 2^N N-parents start to increase - and ancestry.com has done well at providing links to other researcher's public trees when they become available. This pattern has the effect of encouraging subscribers who have already found most of their ancestors out to level N, for whatever N, to continue to subscribe in hopes of finding a new link from another researcher, or perhaps a new clue in a newly digitized document set. It will be interesting to see how the decreasing cost of genome analysis affects family history research - perhaps helping find distant cousins, or perhaps revealing surprising differences between a presumed history and the biological record.

rmc 14y ago
The LDS was also strong in producing the GEDCOM data standard, which is widely (almost universally) used for family tree exchanges And of course, since they are bigots, they don't let 2 men be married in their GEDCOM standard, or other non-traditional family structures. Get your politics out of standards.
- resplin 14y ago
  Calling people bigots does nothing to promote civil discourse about important issues such as homosexual marriage. The standard was drafted in 1984, long before efforts to redefine marriage. It isn't very fair of you to project your 21st century politics back on the creators of a 30 year old standard. You apply the label of bigotry to exclude from the conversation those who differ in opinion from you. That isn't how democracies are designed to function. Nor does it recognize the complexity of the issue. Religious people can desire a standard of public morality without espousing hatred for those who don't share that standard. Calling that bigotry makes it harder to identify true prejudice.

resplin 14y ago

Though Ancestry.com has some agreements to share resources with the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, it is a completely separate organization and a for profit company. It was founded by Mormons, many of the employees are Mormons, and lots of the customers are Mormons and driven by their religious interest; but it is distinct from the work you are discussing. The efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ are all non-profit and publicly available at Family Search (http://familysearch.org http://familysearch.org).

dabent 14y ago

Mormons may have done some of the work to help build out Ancestry.com's database, but they also have built a free competitor: FamilySearch.org From a startup perspective, the base of records is important, but the 1.6 billion dollar purchase came from lots of paying customers who aren't Mormon (there just aren't enough Mormons who are devout to the point where they will pay for a genealogy resource when a free one built by their own faith exists). The Ancestry folks just took a relatively cheap/free pool of data, and did the work necessary to feed that data to customers willing to pay. I'd guess there are a lot more startups that can be built on readily available data sets like this. Congrats to the Ancestry.com team. Edited to add how cool this whole business model is. Something that could be thought of as a "lifestyle business" ended up with a huge win by having the silly ideas of charging customers and building something people wanted. Disclosure: I'm a Mormon.

computerbob 14y ago
It seems that the site is down. Would they close "FamilySearch.org" because of the acquisition? Or is this because of AWS?
- dabent 14y ago
  It's likely server issues. I don't believe the Ancestry.com acquisition will change anything with FamilySearch.

lukeholder 14y ago

for anyone that is interested this verse is used to support the doctrine: http://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/1-cor/15.29?lang=eng#28 http://www.lds.org/scriptures/nt/1-cor/15.29?lang=eng#28

SiVal 14y ago

The LDS Church has records that are donated to it by its members and others. It also has an extraordinary collection of microfilmed church records from little churches (of all denominations) from around the globe. These churches are often very sensitive about their records and how they will be used. These records are made available free to any individual who wants to do genealogical research through an LDS Family History Center, but they are NOT made available to commercial organizations such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com, on the other hand, photographs public records such as census documents or licenses private records such as shipping manifests, indexes them, and sells access to the indexes and photos. They are free to resell their data and, by selling the company, that's what they'll be doing. They own the copyrights of the hi-rez photos of old census docs, even though the docs themselves are in the public domain.