The Fastest Growing Religion on Earth

Chapter 27

In 1823, an 18-year-old boy from Palmyra, New York, was visited by an angel, who told him of some magical gold plates. Armed with special glasses, he was able to translate them into a book that told about how the lost tribe of Israel was visited by Jesus in the Americas hundreds of years ago. In 1831, he started a church in Kirtland, Ohio.

He later said that church members could act as proxies for deceased persons, baptize them, and “seal” them into family clans that would be reunited in Heaven. His successor wrote about “the perfect mania” that possessed some of his followers as they started “to get up printed records of their ancestors.”

Over the next 168 years, 113 million people were introduced, after death, to the church.

Members of his church, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, commonly known as the Mormons), are worried that their ancestors who lived before the beginning of the church won’t be able to join them in heaven. But in order to get them into the church, they have to figure out who they are first.

That makes them some pretty damn good genealogists.

They’ve got a vault carved into the solid granite of a mountain 20 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, where they store information about the births, marriages and deaths of over 2 billion people, the largest single database on the details of the human race in the world. Buried 600 feet into the mountain, protected by two nine ton and one 14 ton doors built to withstand a nuclear blast, the Granite Mountain Vault isn’t going anywhere soon. Five billion documents are stored on 1 ½ million rolls of microfilm and 1 ½ million microfiche. 25,000 volunteers are currently working to scan and index all of these documents as well as put them on the internet so that one day soon you can access all of this data while sitting in your kitchen in your slippers with a laptop on your lap.

Ancestry.com, a subscription based service started by members of the LDS church, has 900,000 subscribers, and is growing. Ancestry put millions of documents online, including 5 billion names. They have census records for all of the US from the past 200 years, birth, marriage and death records, and more. In May of 2007 they dumped the military records of all of the soldiers who fought in all of the US wars, 90 million of them, online.

Genealogy is now America’s #1 hobby. Millions of documents are being put on line so that subscribers can sit in their kitchens rather than traipsing across the country in search of obscure church and governmental archives.

As the fastest growing church in the world, you have to wonder if the Mormons are onto something. That connecting with the nodes of your family, those linked to you by sperm and eggs and DNA, looping simultaneously backward and forward through space and time, like the drooping lines connecting the electricity towers that move through mowed swaths of forest in the rural parts of America, will lead you to paradise?

Who am I to say no?

     In 1823, an 18-year-old boy from Palmyra, New York, was visited by an angel, who told him of some magical gold plates. Armed with special glasses, he was able to translate them into a book that told about how the lost tribe of Israel was visited by Jesus in the Americas hundreds of years ago. In 1831, he started a church in Kirtland, Ohio.

     He later said that church members could act as proxies for deceased persons, baptize them, and “seal” them into family clans that would be reunited in Heaven. His successor wrote about “the perfect mania” that possessed some of his followers as they started “to get up printed records of their ancestors.”

     Over the next 168 years, 113 million people were introduced, after death, to the church.

     Members of his church, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, commonly known as the Mormons), are worried that their ancestors who lived before the beginning of the church won’t be able to join them in heaven. But in order to get them into the church, they have to figure out who they are first.

     That makes them some pretty damn good genealogists.

     They’ve got a vault carved into the solid granite of a mountain 20 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah, where they store information about the births, marriages and deaths of over 2 billion people, the largest single database on the details of the human race in the world. Buried 600 feet into the mountain, protected by two nine-ton and one 14-ton doors built to withstand a nuclear blast, the Granite Mountain Vault isn’t going anywhere soon. Five billion documents are stored on 1 ½ million rolls of microfilm and 1 ½ million microfiche. Twenty-five thousand volunteers are currently working to scan and index all of these documents as well as put them on the Internet so that one day soon you can access all of this data while sitting in your kitchen in your slippers with a notebook computer on your lap.

     Ancestry.com, a subscription-based service started by members of the LDS church, has 900,000 subscribers, and is growing. Ancestry put millions of documents online, including five billion names. They have census records for all of the US from the past 200 years, birth, marriage and death records, and more. In May of 2007, they dumped the military records of all of the soldiers who fought in all of the US wars, 90 million of them, online.

     Genealogy is now America’s #1 hobby. Millions of documents are being put on line so that subscribers can sit in their kitchens rather than traipsing across the country in search of obscure church and governmental archives.

     As the fastest-growing church in the world, you have to wonder if the Mormons are onto something. That connecting with the nodes of your family, those linked to you by sperm and eggs and DNA, looping simultaneously backward and forward through space and time, like the drooping lines connecting the electricity towers that move through mowed swaths of forest in the rural parts of America, will lead you to paradise?

     Who am I to say no?

Since I wrote my post on “A Brief History of Bastards” the letters have been pouring in with readers telling me about their own bastard stories. Well we haven’t been sitting idle here at the Drug News and Health Safety Blog either. In fact, one of us has been asking the question, has anyone seen this soldier?

South Vietnam, 1968

The baby actually works now for the Drug Safety and Health News Blog in the Research Department. Betcha never thought she’d get out of that cesspool, didya soldier? Here she is again.

Someday I'm gonna work for "Drug Safety" blog!

Anyhoo, being the kinda guy I am, I applied my finely honed abilities fresh from finding 42 aunts, uncles and cousins related to me through my mother who was adopted at birth, and tried tracking down the sheepish looking man in the picture. She couldn’t remember his name at first and said it was “Darryl S.” So I found a wife of a Darryl S. in Indiana last year who was working at some kind of fundamentalist church. Bad sign. Anyhoo I sent her an email.

ME: Hi, I am doing some family research for a friend of mine. Was your husband living in Ohio in 1968? (He he, a little deceptive, noo?)

WIFE OF DARRYL: No, Why do you ask?

ME: Actually, I am looking for someone for someone who was a soldier in Vietnam in 1968. My friend thinks she might be related to him.

I didn’t hear back from her for a while. When I recontacted her she basically said that he wasn’t the one, and thanks alot for screwing up their marriage by making her have doubts about him and possible babies outside of their marriage. I thought they were supposed to be good Christians?

The next time I got on the track it was with the accurate name, Dale S. I found about 12 Dale S. in the US. Baptist preacher from Arkansas? Too young. Professor from Canada? Also too young. Jewish musician from LA? I emailed him and he was not the one. 

There was one in North Dakota who was in the right age range. Again, the wife was easier to find cuz her email was on the internet, but she didn’t respond, so I gave her a call.

ME: I am looking for someone who was a soldier in Vietnam in 1968. This friend of mine thinks she might be related to him.

WIFE OF DALE S: Well he was in Vietnam but that couldn’t be him, because I was dating him and he isn’t that kind of a guy.

I didn’t hear from her, and a week later I emailed her the picture above, following which I got an immediate response of relief that that man was not HER Dale S.

Anyhoo I had one more on the list…

Hmmm… Interesting title, you say. Yes indeed! Not everyday you read about bastards in the Science Section of the New York Times. That, of course, is why readers have to come to alternative news sources like the Drug Safety and Health News Blog to find information on more uncomfortable topics in the realm of medicine and mental health.

Anyhoo, the topic comes up because my beloved mother, who died when I was almost five years old, was adopted at birth, and a couple of years ago I had the adoption records opened and found out that she had been born out of wedlock. I was able to track down some of her family, but others I wasn’t sure if they wanted to know that their father had had a child (her) out of wedlock, but when the time came for us to have a belated memorial for her last fall, I decided that they should know about her. So I called someone who was her half sister, who didn’t know about her, and the conversation went something like this:

ME: I am calling to let you know that you had a half sister. She died in 1966. She was my mother.

HALF AUNT: How I am I supposed to believe you? [after receiving various pieces of information that I might be correct]. I am proud of you for your research. [awkward pause]

ME: Well I don’t want to butt into your life or anything, I just thought you should know.

HALF AUNT: I am proud of you for that as well. [awkward pause #2]

Click. I sent her a bunch of pictures and things about our wonderful families and all, with my phone number, but never heard back from her. Recently, I had another lost cousin contact me (yeah, the one from Eastern Washington with the guns and the stogies). I had tried to contact him earlier and thought maybe he didn’t want to be found, but in fact he did. So I thought I would contact the children of this woman, since maybe they wanted to know and she shouldn’t be the only keeper of family secrets. When I said that to another of my newly found cousins, she said I was being a bully and had “ambushed” the half-aunt. That was then that I realized that half-aunt was actually ashamed of the fact that her half-sister was born out of wedlock. I had thought that such stigma against kids born out of wedlock was long gone, but maybe not. That got me to thinking, was Mommy a bastard? or was there another word for girls? That was why I was glad that one of my favorite things on the web, Yahoo! answers [a program that lets you ask a question and let a bunch of people answer, and then vote on the best answer], had asked “Can a female be a bastard?” had come back with the answer that she is a “bastard child”. Not a bitch, that would be a female dog.

Phew!

Anyhoo I couldn’t believe that people would still be prejudiced against people born out of wedlock. I mean we have an African American president now for Christ’s sake! Saying that half-aunt was born in the 30s and we should understand her views is like saying that we should go along with people who are racist against blacks cuz they were born in an earlier time!

BTW my genetic analysis showed that I am 4% black, and that is not “Black Norwegian” as the Bremners used to say about my Mom! That is Sub-saharan African!

Anyhoo all this reflection on bastards made me start reading about it. Turns out the term “illegitimite” refers to the fact that children born out of wedlock were literally not “legitimate”, i.e. had no legal status as human beings, up until the laws were changed (in Britain at least) in the 1940s. Seems like the government was trying to punish people who had kids outside of marriage by depriving their kids of any legal right to exist. It was common practice to lie and say that the kid was actually the child of the grand parents (with the mother being the sibling) or the child of a second man, or any number of things. These kids were often put up for adoption (as was my Mom). They were also extremely vulnerable to abuse and neglect, and were very insecure about themselves. Someone made the comment that it is morally dubious, at best, to blame the children for the actions of their parents.

The corporate staff at the Drug News and Health Safety Blog couldn’t agree more.

That is why we have declared the week of Feb. 2 2009:

Be kind to a bastard week. .