<p>Family members have dabbled in genealogy, and we have incomplete records. I know That Ralph Waldo Emerson and Daniel Boone are cousins of mine, and I’m pretty closely related to William (don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes) Prescott, and Samuel Prescott, who rode with Paul Revere.</p>
<p>My dad’s side is all turn of the last century Jewish immigrants from Germany and Poland, but we only have a little information about them.</p>
<p>While I’ll agree with those who say the Mormon records have lots of errors, I think the protests about the baptisms are misguided. I’m not Mormon and welcome any corrections by someone who is if I misstate any beliefs. </p>
<p>Most of my ancestors are Catholic. Pope Benedict is trying to get churches to refuse to give Mormons access to the records because he doesn’t want Catholics to be rebaptized in the Mormon faith after death. </p>
<p>While I’m not Mormon, the truth is that one heck of a lot of records would have been lost to EVERYONE without the Mormons. Not only are they a lot easier to find, thanks to the Mormons, but some have been lost or destroyed since they were filmed. So, while I don’t think the Mormon rebaptism of my Catholic ancestors has any impact at all–except to make some Mormons feel better–I view it as a small price to pay for the preservation of records which nobody else was willing to preserve. </p>
<p>Please understand that in the Mormon faith you can’t just go around baptizing and marrying deceased people. You can only do so for your own ancestors, which is the reason genealogy is so important to the Mormons. </p>
<p>Now, while I can certainly understand why Jews would be upset at the idea of having their ancestors baptized by Mormons (or anyone else), it should be remembered that the Mormons doing so are ALSO the descendants of the people who are being baptized. While I don’t agree with their beliefs, they really and truly believe that they are doing something wonderful for their OWN ancestors. So, in reality, NOBODY can be baptized as a Mormon without the active participation of at least one member of the deceased’s family. They believe that if they are baptized and go through a sealing ceremony as proxies for their ancestors, their ancestors will be reunited in the afterlife. That is, great-gramps and great-grandma will be reunited in the next world. If they don’t do it, great-gramps and great-grandma will continue to be separated from one another. </p>
<p>That’s why the Mormons aren’t all that strict about documentation. If the deceased person MIGHT be the ancestor of a Mormon, then the Mormons will go through the ceremony in the hope that they will help their ancestors. They do keep careful records of everyone who has been baptized and sealed, in part so they don’t just keep redoing the same folks. However, if nobody is positive which of several Jane Smiths is the one who married John Jones, then it’s perfectly all right if descendants of several different Jane Smiths try to seal her to John. Only the actions of the descendants of the “right” Jane will have any effect. </p>
<p>You should also understand that the deceased is given a choice. Thus, if (s)he wishes to, (s)he can refuse. So, if grandma and grandpa are as offended by the attempt to baptize them as Mormons as their descendants of the Jewish faith, they can refuse. And folks who were unhappily married can refuse to be reunited in the afterlife. </p>
<p>Again, that’s just my understanding. If anyone knows more than I do, feel free to correct me. I’m obviously explaining beliefs which are not my own and I may misunderstand them. I am grateful for all the work Mormons do to preserve records and their willingness to share them with the rest of us–without making any effort to convert us.</p>
<p>garland, let me know if you’re ever interested in how to find out more about your dad’s side of the family. You’d be surprised at how much can be learned, so long as you start with some very basic information like names and approximate period of immigration. What’s really helpful is if you happen to know the specific towns or cities your family came from, although there are often ways to find that out even if you don’t know it to start with.</p>
<p>If the Mormon hierarchy didn’t realize how staggeringly inappropriate it is to baptize Jewish Holocaust victims, I doubt they would have backed down the way they did.</p>
<p>I don’t care what the “justifications” are. It was wrong. And, no, jonri, I doubt very much that you “understand” why Jewish people are upset by this. If you did, you wouldn’t repeat all these excuses, which frankly make little sense even on their own terms. (For example, re-uniting great-grandma and great-grandpa with each other in the other world would make sense only if one of them was already a Mormon. Obviously, then, that excuse has absolutely no bearing on Jewish Holocaust victims, none of whom were Mormons at the time they died.) </p>
<p>Perhaps fortunately, the Mormons have very little in the way of actual Jewish records. (To say that nobody else was willing to preserve Jewish records is offensive. It’s hard to preserve records when you’re being murdered, as much as Jewish communities attempted to do so.) What the Mormons have, for the most part, is copies of records that the civil authorities kept for Jewish people living within their jurisdictions. (A great many of the records they have concerning German Jews were actually microfilmed by the Nazis for their own purposes, and then taken by the Mormons. Just as the 1938 census of German Jews – which can be found in the LDS records as well as in a number of libraries, and which lists my mother and her family – was conducted for evil reasons. There’s a moral difference in my mind between making positive use of records that were created for evil reasons, and using such records, or any other records, to appropriate Jewish “souls” for your own religion. Their actions may not harm the actual victims, but cause great pain to their survivors, and to children of survivors like myself.)</p>
<p>I read ‘Color of Water’ and ‘Slaves in the Family.’ Enjoyed them both.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I still get a bit…impatient, when I read that people are surprised when they’ve just discovered an ancestor they knew little or nothing of. It’s so emblematic of our ‘throw it away’ and what’s new is what’s best society. Much of our history is hidden in plain sight, you’ve just got to be motivated to go look for it.</p>
<p>Thus far, we’ve traced my maternal family to a small rural community in the south, circa 1860. It wasn’t hard at all. Now going farther back than that could be difficult.</p>
<p>Donna,</p>
<p>I’m sorry you were offended. I mean that. However, your message indicates that I did not explain some of it well. </p>
<p>To avoid making things worse, let me use my own ancestors as examples. NONE of my ancestors were Mormon (or, to the best of my knowledge, Jewish). However, some of my ancestors do have Mormon descendants. I do not know any of them personally–not even on the internet.</p>
<p>They do NOT believe that for their baptism and sealing services to be effective that anyone had to be Mormon at the time they died. They DO believe that at the time of death, your connection (my word, not theirs) to others is broken UNLESS you went through a Mormon sealing ceremony during your life time OR a blood descendant does it on your behalf. So, it is not necessary that any of my ancestors were Mormons during their lifetime–and I’m sure none were–for them to be baptized and sealed in the Mormon faith. All that is needed is for for one of their Mormon descendants to act as proxies for them. That may not “make sense” to you–frankly, the whole idea of getting baptized or married as a proxy for a deceased person doesn’t make sense to me either–but Mormons BELIEVE in it. It’s not an “excuse” to them. </p>
<p>The point I was trying to make–and if it doesn’t matter to you, then it doesn’t matter to you–is that the Mormons only try to baptize their OWN ancestors of ANY faith AND the deceased is able to refuse both the baptism and the sealing.</p>
<p>I was also trying to explain in answer to posts complaining that recent Mormon records are “sloppy,” that the Mormons don’t enforce the sort of strict rules about “proving” ancesty that many of us of other faiths apply in tracing our own ancestries because the motivation behind their family history research is all together different.</p>
<p>I would also point out, Jonri, that wholly apart from the Holocaust, it should be fairly obvious that conversions of Jewish people by Christians, whether for the allegedly noble purpose of saving our souls or any other reason, raises extremely negative associations for many Jews given the extremely long history of our people being converted by Christians – usually at the point of a sword or the stake, or on a threat of expulsion from whatever country we were living in. The fact that the people supposedly converted in this case were murdered for the very reason that they were Jewish simply compounds the horrendously negative associations and connotations raised by these ignorant and disrespectful actions. The mythical “choice” the Mormons give to these poor, murdered people to refuse a baptism they obviously didn’t ask for does nothing – nothing – to temper those associations and connotations.</p>
<p>Not to mention that in the vast majority of cases I’m talking about, there was no familial connection between the baptizers and the Holocaust victims being baptized. It was being done en masse, by going through lists of Holocaust victims to find names. So Mormon belief about connections between ancestors of Mormons and their descendants didn’t even apply. Most of the people baptized had no known Mormon descendants. None. Not that that would excuse what was done.</p>
<p>OK, I’ve said my piece now. And I do accept your apology.</p>
<p>^^ That’s the same way, i.e. at the end of a sword, that many Christians became Christians, Muslims became Muslims, etc. It seems to be a common historical theme with many religions. But this is off topic.</p>
<p>I’m not an expert on the reasons why the Mormons have pursued genealogy to the extent they have other than I had the same general understanding that Jonri stated, and I frankly don’t believe in the whole idea of the conversion of dead souls so it’s irrelevant to me, but regardless, they have compiled a lot of good information and if one pays attention to the source documents, etc. it can be a good resource for many people to do some research. If people are starting to research their family history a trip to the archives at a local Mormon library that has them might be worthwhile. I’ve also been to the Mormon genealogy library in SLC (a long tme ago) and the amount of data they had on microfiche was amazing and their openness in sharing the info with anyone interested was appreciated.</p>
<p>I agree it’s off-topic. And I certainly appreciate what the Mormons have done in gathering records, and have used those records from time to time for almost 20 years now.</p>
<p>For anyone who’s interested, the main website for online Jewish genealogical research is jewishgen.org. (Which has recently made many of its records available to ancestry.com, where I believe those records are free and don’t require a subscription.)</p>
<p>I think it’s great that various organizations are making the records freely available to others even if they might have some other, hopefully benign to others who aren’t members of their group, agenda. </p>
<p>From I recall it was the LDS group that also undertook digitizing and making freely available via the web the records from Ellis Island through which many immigrants arived in this country.</p>
<p>jonri & UcsdUcla dad, I don’t know if your posts were directed at anything I said, so let me say I totally agree with your comments about the fine work that the Mormons have done. They share the results of their work generously and are extremely open and friendly to non-LDS people. I use an off-shoot LDS library located in a nearby Mormo church and the people there are wonderful. But as I pointed out originally, they don’t have the same adherence to documentary proof or evidence that true genealogy requires. </p>
<p>But then, many non LDS’ers don’t either ! I can’t count the number of times you hear about newbies who started with grandmother or great mother, and worked back, only to discover some years later that great grandmother wasn’t even a blood relation. Oops. I always tell newbies, if you’re looking up the family of Bill Clinton, don’t start looking for Clintons. Or if your last name is Ford and you’re from President Ford’s home town, your chances of being a blood relative are slim to none - unless it’s through your mother’s family. </p>
<p>And my all-time favorite: people who think they’re descended from George Washington. That’s right up there with Princeton Law School.</p>
<p>^^ My comments were just general and I agree that just like any good research the results are only as valid as the source so having appropriate source docs is important when doing the research - especially when some people try a little too hard to be descended from someone famous.</p>
<p>We did find through research that my SIL and her husband had a common ggggggrandfather about 6 generations back in Norway. That always makes for fun holiday discussions!</p>
<p>Lots of people do try to connect themselves to the famous, or they believe family stories which may or may not be accurate. My references to Presidents Ford and Clinton, was not so much about their fame, but about the fact that they both assumed the family names of men who were not their biological fathers. </p>
<p>To me, genealogy is like mining for gold. Patiently (or, actually, not so patiently) sifting through record after record, knowing that somewhere your relative is hidden there, and being sure that with one more hour at the library table, we’ll turn the page that will suddenly, the gold nugget - uncover a new ancestor, or a female ancestor’s maiden name.</p>
<p>I have recently gotten involved with the family genealogy. I have my family traced back to the 1500’s in Germany and Ireland. Through a message board on ancestry.com I found a distant cousin (in his 80’s) with a garage full of documents, photos, etc. Since we live on opposite sides of the country he has been wonderful about scanning information and photos and sharing them with me.</p>
<p>mkm, how wonderful for you! </p>
<p>People like DonnaL, and mkm’s relative, are the genealogy angels. They do research and then share with others, with a generous and giving spirit. The best part is, there are lots of genealogy angels.</p>
<p>Like Donna, I have made extensive use of jewishgen. </p>
<p>I traced my paternal side back to the late 1700’s (Poland) and in doing so, “bumped” into a cousin of mine on a genealogy board. We were both researching the same, rather uncommon last name. As it turns out, his father and my father were first cousins who had never met. His grandmother and my grandfather were sister and brother who emigrated here as teenagers after their parents died; they subsequently had a falling out, and my grandfather’s name was never mentioned in his sister’s house and vice versa. </p>
<p>I traced my maternal (Catholic) side back to the late 1600’s - much easier, as those Germans keep awesome church records, and the only thing that stopped me from going farther back was how much I was willing to pay the Bavarian researcher. </p>
<p>When my sister had a daughter, I commissioned a plate for her that had her daughter’s name and birth date / place in the middle, and then around the edges I had, starting at 12 o’clock and going clockwise, my sister’s name/date of birth, my mother’s name/date of birth, my grandmother’s, and so on for about six or so “greats.” It’s rather neat to reflect on all these women, becoming mothers of daughters, and how unimaginable all of our lives would have been to one another. Like Margaretha, born in a poor German farm town in 1698, could have any clue what our lives are like in America in 2010!</p>
<p>A few facts that were fun during my research were as follows:
<p>
</p>
<p>This appears to be the case with my husband’s paternal side as well (also Catholics). Someone in the family was able to trace their roots back to 1615 Barvaria (I think that’s where they were from—it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at the family tree we were sent in the mail. Man is that sucker long! A good six feet at least). When I saw it, I absolutely marveled with incredulity, and then became down right envious. The the farthest we’ve been able to trace my paternal side was to the last slave patriarch and Matriarch prior to the Emancipation. Like Emmett’s and many other African American families, it has proven impossible to go any farther because slave family connections were considered “irrelevant to commerce”. Thinking of that always makes me feel terribly cheated, and not a small bit angry. I think the thing about Emmett’s story that hit me the hardest was when the historian showed him the carefully bound and preserved documentation of the lineage of the horses of Virginia’s planters from that era, and pointed out that the preservation of the genealogy of these animals was considered far more important than that of any human slave’s. The other poignant moment was when Emmett stood at the boundary of the carefully kept cemetery of his white great great great great grandmother and looked toward what was believed to be the place where his slave ancestors were interred: an overgrown wooded area with not the slightest hint that human beings might be buried there. Lisa Kudrow’s story of the way all the Jews of her ancestral town, including her family members, were rounded up and shot so that they might fall into a pit that was to be their mass grave was heart-rending. As she stood fingering the words on the memorial erected at that sight, I found myself heart-broken and in tears. Nevertheless, Lisa was glad to have made the trip in order to emotionally and spiritually connect with these important pieces of her past—as was Emmett Smith. As painful as it would be, I think that I too would be grateful for the opportunity to do the same.</p>
<p>mkm56 - were you able to find any Irish church records? I have tried for our county (Clare) and was told that all Catholic records were all destroyed when England overtook Ireland. What a shame. </p>
<p>I have also found that the Germans have the best records with 2nd place going to the Danes. I am at a total loss on how to research my Polish roots. My grandmother’s family fled in the middle of the night and their true heritage was a forbidden topic. Sad…</p>
<p>In our case, hayden, we have a published genealogy that was well-researched sometime in the last century of my grandmother’s family on her paternal side. It’s definitely not guessing at names. and its online manifestation bumped us right into Emerson–we’re fourth cousins five times removed. As far as Boone, my great-great grandmother, a Boone, is listed in the Boone anthology, so we’re on solid ground on that one, too. First cousins with Danny, removed about nine generations. The Prescotts I don’t have as solid, but I think some family member does (if you know your family goes back to the colonies in the 1600’s, you end up related to pretty much everyone else whose family does.)</p>