Where are all these Mormons coming from? Between Mitt Romney running for president on a “I’m a conservative like you, just a slightly different flavor” platform and HBO’s Big Love with its pandering after the ups and downs of sex in a multiple wife marriage, it seems like the Mormons [...]]]>

Where are all these Mormons coming from? Between Mitt Romney running for president on a “I’m a conservative like you, just a slightly different flavor” platform and HBO’s Big Love with its pandering after the ups and downs of sex in a multiple wife marriage, it seems like the Mormons are coming out of nowhere. But what most people don’t know is that the Mormons have not just been cooling their heels in Utah for the past 100 years. They have been on a role for quite some time now.
While the Baptists have been struggling to retain members and the Methodist and Episcopalian churches have been shrinking, the Mormon church (known as Latter Day Saints, or LDS, by their members) has been expanding at a rapid clip. In fact, it is the fastest growing religion in the world. There are now far more Mormons outside of Utah than within the boundaries of the beehive state.
What’s the appeal? The Mormons don’t lay a lot of head trips on their members like all that stuff about Adam and Eve and original sin. For LDS we are all on a continuous trajectory from imperfection to a higher plane. God and Jesus are just like us (yes, they are physical beings), they are just farther along on the spiritual journey. Death is not the end, it is just a marker on the journey. And we are all traveling with our extended families. But in order to make sure that their families are coming with them, LDS members have to find out who they are.
You may not know it, but the Mormons have been collecting information on your family for quite some time now. For them, genealogy is a religion. And they believe that advent of the internet (which allows information to be made available to everything through sites like Ancestry.com) was divinely inspired. Having personally experienced the mesmerizing pull of searching for my own ancestors, I think that is a big part of their draw. And as a psychiatrist I think that doing genealogical research on the internet has become like an addiction for many people.

You can read more about my speculations on Mormonism, genealogy, and my own quest to find my missing family in my recently released book The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, available in paperback and also $0.99 Kindle.

You can read the first chapter here and the enthusiastic reader reviews here.

What people are saying about The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg: Accutane – the truth that had to be told.

“Riveting, compelling, fascinating.”

“Frighteningly well written.”

“This is an amazing book, especially since it is non-fiction.”

“I could not put this book down until I got to [...]]]>

What people are saying about The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg: Accutane – the truth that had to be told.

“Riveting, compelling, fascinating.”

“Frighteningly well written.”

“This is an amazing book, especially since it is non-fiction.”

“I could not put this book down until I got to the end… Thankfully, his writing is succinct. It is also quite poignant, surprising, revealing and at times even hilarious.”

“Poignant and heart-wrenching.”

“Frightening, moving, personal and redemptive.”

“A raw, honest, prescient page-turner.”

“A moving account weaving together his personal struggles of loss and shame.”

“A must read for everyone who believes in justice for all.”

“A very important tale stunningly well told.”

“A riveting and excellent read – I read it in one sitting. I highly recommend it.”

***

CHAPTER 1

Palm trees lined the road leading from the Orlando airport. A few puffs of white clouds sat unmoving in the brilliant blue Florida sky. My seven-year-old son, Lucca, played a hand-held computer game in the back seat of the cab. My wife, Viola, and twelve-year-old daughter, Lucia, looked out the window. I rode up front, thinking about how much I would be paid for the lectures I would be giving over the next year or so. The year was 2001.

We checked into the Disney World Hotel and went up to our rooms. Lucca grabbed the room key and ran ahead. He opened the door, ran in and jumped on the bed.

“Is this our room?” he asked, excitedly.

“Get your bags, Lucca,” I said.

When the family was settled, I headed for the courtesy room of the private company that organized medical education events on behalf of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the makers of the antidepressant drug, Paxil. They had invited me to give the kick-off lecture for their initiative to push Paxil into the market for people with anxiety disorders. They called it Psychnet. The plan was for me to give a lecture to a bunch of psychiatrists from across the country, educating them about the benefits of Paxil in the treatment of anxiety disorders, and they would in turn, for pay, fan out across the country giving lectures to other psychiatrists on the same topic. Not only would I get paid for doing this, but I would be tagged as a preferred speaker for their nationwide lecture series for psychiatrists. Over the next year or two, I would give about 15 talks across the country, with the usual price being $2,000 plus travel expenses. However, I learned that many of the speakers canceled at the last moment, so I could squeeze out as much as $5,000 for giving a talk at the last minute’s notice.

I stood for a moment before the door and checked my suit to see if it had any spots on it. Then I knocked.

“Come on in, Dr. Bremner,” an attractive and smiling Asian woman said as she opened the door. “We’re going over your slides now.”

The room was filled with a bunch of good-looking young people hunched over laptops who seemed bright and energetic. A floor-to-ceiling plain glass window looked out over palm trees evenly spaced over a closely cut green lawn with the blue of the Florida sea just beyond.

“How does this look?” The woman waved me over to one of the laptops.

I scrolled through the slides.

“You’ve got some great graphic art support,” I responded. That brought on a spontaneous smile.

“Thanks, Doctor. Any corrections?”

“No, these look great. When do I go out?”

“Your talk is in 30 minutes.”

There was a knock at the door. She walked over and opened it.

Scott Sproul entered the room. We had hung out together at a bar the year before and gossiped about the ups and downs of the pharmaceutical industry. Scott was one of the most up-beat people I ever met. He was now head of the Paxil marketing team.

“Thanks for coming down, Doug.” He slapped me on the back. “How’s the family?”

“They’re doing great.” The attention made me feel uncomfortable.

“Have they ever been to Disney World before?”

“No, this is the first time. Thanks for the invite.”

“Well, it’s great to have you here, Doug. I think you’re gonna really help us get our message out about Paxil.”

“Glad to help.” And I meant it.

“Here’re some tickets for Disney World for you and your family, for the weekend.”

“Wow, that’s really nice of you. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem. Ready for your lecture?”

“Yeah, OK.”

We walked toward the lecture hall. He opened the door and slapped me on the back.

“Go on out there and sell some Paxil, Doug!”

* * *

A few weeks later I was coming back through the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta after giving an out-of-town lecture, when I ran into Charlie Nemeroff, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, where I had just been recruited. He was an energetic and gregarious man who was in constant motion. Nemeroff was known as one of the leaders in the field of academic psychiatry, what we called a “shining light.” A recent magazine article about him was called “Boss of Bosses,” and prominently featured him on the cover, in a white jacket with his arms folded across his chest.

“How’s it going, Doug?” he asked.

“Great. Thanks for the recommendation to be a speaker for the Psychnet program.”

“We take care of our faculty at Emory. Hey, Doug. About that Accutane study you’re doing?”

“Yeah?”

“Make sure you meet with the dean about it. He’s a dermatologist. We don’t want any political hot potatoes. And get the dermatologists involved. They can refer acne patients to you.”

He looked tired. He’d probably been on the road for a while.

“OK, no problem.”

“Well, I’ve got to run. Catching a plane to Fort Lauderdale to give a talk about norepinephrine and depression. Are you interested in norepinephrine, Doug?”

“Yeah, sure.” Nemeroff had done some research on the effects of Paxil on the norepinephrine system. GSK was using that angle to market Paxil as being better than the other SSRI antidepressants. They were eager to get people like Nemeroff out there talking about the science behind it all.

“Ok, catch you later.” He turned and walked off, pulling his rolling suitcase behind him.

I stood there and watched him walk away. While waiting for an appointment with him just after moving to Atlanta, I had seen his curriculum vitae sitting out on a table. It listed work as a consultant for the maker of Accutane, but it didn’t look active, and he was consulting for a gazillion other drug companies, so I figured it was no big deal. Nevertheless, I felt a little uneasy. Whenever there was money involved, you had to be careful.

Don’t worry about it, I thought. Just meet with the people like he asked you to do, don’t make any waves, do what you’re told, and everything will work out fine.

Read all the reviews for The Goose here.

Continue reading THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGG on Kindle for $2.99 here or paperback here.

n. pl. ge•ne•al•o•gies

1. A record or table of the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or ancestors; a family tree.
2. Direct descent from an ancestor; lineage or pedigree.
3. The study or investigation of ancestry and family histories.

* [...]]]> ge•ne•al•o•gy(jn-l-j, -l-, jn-)

n. pl. ge•ne•al•o•gies

1. A record or table of the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or ancestors; a family tree.
2. Direct descent from an ancestor; lineage or pedigree.
3. The study or investigation of ancestry and family histories.

* * *

The derivation of the word genealogy literally means a written record (logos) of one’s family (geneo).

The ancient Romans venerated their ancestors. They kept images of them that they worshiped. The practice was also common in China and other Asian countries. “Ancestor worship” is a belief that deceased family members have a continued existence, take an interest in the affairs of the world, and possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living. Some people believe that continued care for the dead is required for their well-being. Others think that devotion to dead ancestors is a matter of duty, regardless of what effects may come from that.

Household shrine to the spirits of the dead ancestors, lars familiaris

For some people, it can become an obsession.

In the early 1990s, Cyndi Howells, a housewife from Puyallup, Washington, and a member of the Tacoma-Pierce County (Washington) Genealogical Society, walked into the annual meeting of the Washington State Genealogical Society, which was being held in her home town. Dressed in a bathrobe and her bathroom slippers, she held up a disk in her right hand.

“I’ve got 20 files on here,” she shouted to the assembled amateur genealogists. “Each file is the address of a place on the Internet where you can find genealogical information. I’m going to see how many more I can find.”

At the next year’s annual meeting of the Washington State Genealogical Society, she came back with 50 more.

And the next year she had even more.

In 1996, she had over 1,000. She called her list cyndislist and used oznet to post it at www.cyndislist.com.

Soon she was crashing oznet. She had to move to a different server.

Cyndislist grew with the Internet to become the craigslist of the genealogy world. At last count, she had 264,800 links to different sites in 180 categories on her site, with over a 1,000 new links added per month, and over 22 million visitors. With 15,000 visitors a day, answering her email and working on her Web site has become a full-time job. Newsweek wrote in February 24, 1997, “The biggest boon to the heritage hunt has been cyberspace. No one has been more influential there than Cyndi Howells, a Puyallup, Wash., housewife who became obsessed with genealogy after tracing her own family tree.”

That was the key word. Obsessed. Why else would an apparently normal person spend hours trolling the Internet to look for online ship passenger lists and other trivia.

Why, indeed?

From Chapters 27 and 31 of The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.

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 [...]]]> 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?