There are times when I can’t quite figure out how my mind works. Last Saturday, I woke up way too early, thinking about a conversation I had had nearly two years ago. At that time someone was making the case that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) was essentially a greedy corporation or a giant hedge fund.
There were many points in this argument, but the one I woke up thinking about was that the church convinces volunteers to do hours of indexing–typing names from old records into a database so that people can search for their ancestors online—and then sells that digital data to companies for a profit. Specifically, I was told that FamilySearch, the genealogical arm of the LDS church, had sold records produced by volunteer labor to Ancestry.com for 60 million dollars.
Honestly, I’ve spent most of the last two years sorting through the many, many negative claims that I heard during that period, and just over one year writing about them, but I hadn’t given this particular charge any real thought. Then out of the blue, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. anxious to know if the LDS church had really sold indexed names for a profit.
I slipped out of bed, went to the computer and started searching for an answer to this question. It took nearly two hours to find any source that contained anything but praise for FamilySearch or its partnership with Ancestry. When I finally found an allegation of wrongdoing, I was intrigued. Let me explain.
Have you ever played that telephone game where you sit in a circle and the first person whispers a message in the next person’s ear? They, in turn, whisper it to the next person until the message reaches the last person, usually scrambled, unrecognizable or devoid of the original meaning.
Well, please allow me to take you back from the accusation I heard, to something that could have been its source. Let me be clear; I don’t know where my friend heard these particular claims against the church—critics of the church often repeat each other—but this the only thing I was able to find in my search that matched, and it makes an interesting study.
I found a post titled,
“Exploitation and Spin: How the LDS church is making millions by driving members to do Genealogy work, and selling the results back to them and others.”
The author appeared to be well informed and used many footnotes to add credibility to his argument. Note: I used the “his” pronoun because like so many on these sites the author used a vague pseudonym. The post makes the case that the church systematically convinces members that their salvation hinges on doing temple work for themselves and their ancestors, charges them tithing to enter the temple, cons them into doing genealogy and indexing, and then sells the resulting records for a profit. Here is an exact quote listing an event from 2013.
LDS church signs over a billion records indexed by volunteers (roughly everything to date) over to ancestry.com in exchange for $60 million dollar and 5 years of free access to the site for LDS members.
Notice for the purpose of our game of telephone that he doesn’t actually claim that Ancestry bought the records or that the church received the $60 million. That is only implied by the title and surrounding argument. I followed the footnote to a legitimate-looking Associated Press news article. It’s brief, so I’ve included the whole thing here.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Mormon church’s family history research center has signed a new agreement with Ancestry.com in a project to make 1 billion new genealogical records available to the public.
The Deseret News reports Family Search signed a five-year, $60 million deal with the Provo-based private company. Family Search is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ nonprofit organization dedicated to the research of family history.
The plan is for the two entities to work together to dig into the deep genealogical vaults of the Mormon church to digitize and index up to 1 billion new records that allow people around the world to research their family trees.
The two sides have worked together before, with millions of records already available to users on both ends.
As you can see, this gives credence to the footnoted claim, but also adds some additional information and context. I noticed that this news snippet was taken from the Deseret News and was able to find the original story and a corresponding one from the Salt Lake Tribune on the same day.
These stories are much longer and present a more in-depth and consistent view of the agreement between FamilySearch and Ancestry, which I will only summarize here, but I’ve included links for anyone wanting to judge all the details for themselves.
It seems that the church has billions of records, stored in its granite vault on microfiche that it would like to digitize and make available to church members and the public. Of course, a project of this size requires considerable time, labor and money. While the church, acting as the nonprofit FamilySearch, has a primary goal which is spiritual and the for-profit Ancestry.com has a primary goal of making money, they share the goal of digitizing as many records as quickly as possible. Combining resources has the potential of doing in years what might take the church alone decades to do.
Neither article is clear on the particulars of how the $60 million will be spent but both are clear that the money will go towards making more records available to users of both services as quickly as possible. There is no indication that the church itself or its leaders will receive any of the money.
As I consider the stated purposes of the church to perfect the saints, proclaim the gospel, and redeem the dead, I can’t help but feel that collaborating with others in this way is both smart and inspiring. Rather than feeling “exploited”, I feel even more motivated to move forward in this work, knowing that the church is doing all it can to multiply those efforts.
I certainly can understand that for those who don’t believe as I do, or who haven’t had spiritual experiences to build their faith, the LDS church’s focus on genealogy and temple work can be hard to comprehend or explain. For them, the much simpler justification of greed, money, or power may seem more clear or understandable.
Beyond making me feel really good about the family history work of the church, this research has been an excellent example of how critics of the church use actual truth to paint a less-than-true picture. If someone is questioning or doubting the church, I can see how the argument I first referenced could seem compelling. I can also easily imagine how a person could follow the footnote to the AP story and come to the conclusion that the critic was telling the truth and the church is in actually selling indexed names to make a profit. It took me several hours to get to the heart of the story and even then, I was only truly satisfied because I believe in life after death and the church’s mission to find and do temple work for our ancestors.
I have seen similar approaches used time after time while investigating claims against the church. The accusation is easily made and can be backed up by some verifiable portion of the truth. The whole truth may be much harder to find or comprehend. In this case, it only took a few hours to resolve my questions, but it seems to me, that most of the questions we face are much more difficult. Some require years of spiritual wrestling, patience, and personal revelation, and often that revelation simply comes as a feeling of peace or a quiet reassurance that we are on a good path and we need to keep going—not at all the kind of proof likely to satisfy those who demand logic and evidence.
Still, I believe and hope I can help others to believe, and maybe do a little indexing along the way.
