|
Mormon LDS Genealogy
The Mormons, or Latter Day Saints, have put a great deal of work into setting up genealogy centers around the US and providing research materials to all users.
The Mormons and Genealogy
You might ask why the Mormons are so interested in genealogy research. After all, while every religion puts high value on family relations, you don't see the Catholic Church or Protestant groups putting together massive libraries of genealogy information, or making it incredibly easy for the public to share in that knowledge. If anything, it usually takes quite a bit of effort to track down the Catholic church you're interested in getting records from, writing them and receiving a response. You have the most luck getting records from churches the LDS have already taken care of and put onto a CD for you.
The answer has to do with the nature of the LDS faith. The Mormon religion was founded relatively recently. It would be very hard therefore to say "anyone who died without becoming a Mormon is doomed to Hell", given how recently the religion even existed. So the Mormons believe in a system of, in essence, retroactive baptism.
The catch is that you, as a current day Mormon, must be able to identify who your ancestors were. You need to research them, determine their name, birth date, death date, etc. Once you have that information, you can go to your temple and make a "covenant" on behalf of that ancestor. That gives your ancestor the ability to become a Mormon before the final Judgement Day.
A main component of the Mormon faith is that families will be reunited in Heaven even though death might temporarily separate them. A family therefore would want their grandparents ... their grandparent's parents ... their grandparent's parent's parents, and so on, to all be together. To do that requires research in finding out who those people were, so that the covenant can be created.
How Does the Mormon Genealogy Help Me?
Even if you aren't a Mormon, the HUGE amount of work done by Mormons is a great help to genealogists around the world. Because there are Mormons in all cultures, there is genealogy being done BY Mormons in every corner of the globe. The Mormon religion has dedicated a vast number of resources to their genealogy projects, and then have made most of the results of this work available for free to anybody.
This means that you can visit your local Family History site, or go to the FamilySearch.org website and access millions of records of information. Whether it's a census sheet from Alabama, a church register from Ireland or a town history from Italy, the Mormons probably have looked into digitizing it for you. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to fly to a remote location and weeks of time pouring through records, you might be able to find it out with a few clicks of the mouse.
Whether you agree or disagree with the Mormons religious stance, all genealogists should appreciate the work they've done to help us all with our genealogy research! In only a few years, the Mormons have digitized millions of records and are working on millions more. It's a result that few genealogists would have dreamed was possible a mere generation ago.
FamilySearch.org website
Main Listing Page
All Genealogy Articles
Note - Lisa Shea wrote this content for the genealogy site at BellaOnline.com - you might still find this content there as well. That's fine :) I gave permission!
Lisa Shea Homepage | Advertising Info | Low Carb Recipes | Sangria Recipes | Travelogues | Game Walkthroughs
All content copyright © 2008 Minerva WebWorks LLC. All rights reserved.
You MUST GET WRITTEN PERMISSION to reprint or republish any of this material.
|
