'Lion of the Lord' Brigham Young (1801-1877)
A few months ago (Feb 2014) there was a press release that members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints will be given free subscriptions to the Ancestry.com, FindMyPast and the
MyHeritage websites in the near future. This is the result of a deal where
these commercial websites will be able to use LDS Church’s records on their
sites. Mormons will get free access to them from home.
I hear people often
ask: do the Mormons own Ancestry.com?
The answer is no. It was originally started by two students of Brigham Young
University in 1984. It currently has its headquarters is in Provo, Utah, a city
with a 98% Mormon population which is home to the Mormon Missionary Training
Centre, Brigham Young University and the Osmond brothers. But it is, after a
few changes of ownership, now a publicly listed NASDAQ company owned by a
number of companies and equity firms. None of which are specifically Mormon.
The Mormons do own FamilySearch.org which is a free non-profit website.
I thought I would
do some research to see if I had any Mormon ancestors. Not knowing how to
approach this I thought my ancestors from Utah would be a good place to start.
Abigail Armstrong Lees was born in Ogden, Utah in 1857. She was my Great Great
Grandmother. Her parents emigrated from Britain in the 1850’s. When they
arrived they decided to head westward, to what was one of the frontiers of
settlement back then. They ended up in Ogden, Utah not far from Salt Lake City.
Her father Samuel was a locksmith.
Abigail married
Pierre McDonald Bleecker in 1881 in Ogden. He was an Episcopalian (Anglican)
minister and had come to Utah as a missionary from Scarsdale, New York. I
assume he was there to convert ‘Indians’ not Mormons. Abigail’s sister Fannie
also married an Episcopalian minister named William F Bulkley. A friend of
Pierre’s no doubt. Another sister, Lucy, married Pierre’s brother Charles. Most
of the other Lees siblings never married or had few children. Abigail and Rev
Pierre after 6 years moved back east to New Jersey. He preferred the weather
over there. In 1894 Abigail died while in childbirth having only one surviving
child, my Great Grandmother.
Joseph Smith jr (1805-1844)
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead
None of the Lees
family seemed to be Mormons then. But I should ask are they Mormons now?
The reason that Mormons have always had such an interest in collecting and
preserving genealogical records is because they believe they can convert their
ancestors to Mormonism. This they do through a process called Baptism for the Dead.
The prophet Joseph
Smith in August 1840 first introduced this practice in a funeral sermon for one
of his followers quoting Corinthians 15:29 "Else
what shall they do which are baptised for the dead, if the dead rise not at
all? why are they then baptised for the dead?" This is the only
biblical passage that says this and there has been a lot of debate as to what
St Paul meant by it. Nevertheless it is thought that this was a practice of
some persecuted early Christian groups who were afraid they, or their family
members, might be killed before they were baptised. The Mormons, at the time Joseph
Smith jr, made this Church doctrine were also being severely persecuted and must
have had similar fears.
Founder of The Church of the Latter Day Saints
I was really
looking in the wrong place to see if I have any Mormon ancestors. I thought
about it and remembered once meeting a distant relative (5th cousin)
of mine who was a Mormon. This was in the 1980s. If he was baptising his
ancestors then he was baptising a lot of mine as well! If I had other living
cousins who were Mormon then a lot more of my ancestors are Mormons. I then
realized that all of my ancestors could be Mormons and I would have no idea of
it.
I looked at the Mormon website, Alonzo A Hinckley was an Apostle of the LDS Church. Most of the Hinckley's in the US come from Samuel Hinckley (1589-1662) a Massachusetts puritan. It's also my mother's maiden name. He is a distant cousin of mine, no doubt.
Alonzo A Hinckley (1870-1936) Twelfth Apostle of the LDS Church
I wonder how this
all works? if you were a Mormon who was
really bad at genealogy would you end up baptizing other people’s ancestors? I
often see on Ancestry.com a lot of bodgie family trees that people have uploaded. They are the ones with 150 year
old ancestors or ancestors getting married when they were 9 years old etc
etc. Is this a problem? Also if you only had fragmentary information
about an ancestor eg all you knew was that her name was Mary or his first
initial was J is that enough for a baptism? If you have no information
about an ancestor you know they must have had a mother and a father. Can you
baptise them? If you did accidently baptise someone else’s ancestors what would
happen then? Is that a problem? If not, why not just baptise every dead
person who ever existed?
Looking on the
Wikipedia website about Baptism for the Dead it names a few people that have
been baptised posthumously including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, All of the US
presidents, Genghis Khan, Pope John Paul II and Gautama Buddha, (Liberace isn’t
mentioned). What is going on here? I always imagined that Hitler and Stalin
were rotting somewhere in the pits of fiery Hell. Who was the bright person who
thought this was a good idea?
I imagine now all
these baptised ancestors must be up in Mormon heaven sitting at a large table
having a lovely dinner with Brigham Young and his wives (all 55 of them). They
would all be chewing on their steaks, except for Hitler of course who would be
having something vegetarian. They would be wistfully reminiscing about their
lives. Hitler would be explaining how his last days in Berlin were not spent
organizing a flight to South America but was spent packaging and posting a copy
of Das Buch Mormon to
his distant relatives in New York.
Adolf Hitler (1898-1945) not my ancestor
This practice has
seriously upset some religious groups including the Catholic Church (who are
still coming to terms with their last Pope becoming a Mormon) but mostly from
Jewish groups. Holocaust survivors find this incredibly insensitive and have
asked the LDS Church to remove Holocaust names from their genealogical
databases. In 1995 responding to pressure 300,000 names were removed. However
in 2012 a news story revealed that Anne Frank had been posthumously baptised.
This was for the ninth time.
Baptism has
always been a fundamental practice for almost all denominations of the
Christian Church. It has a symbolic spiritual meaning for individuals but it is
also an initiation rite for the Church. As adults we can choose to follow the
doctrine of a church or we can leave and find another Church if we don’t like it.
Not every Church member has that choice. Babies and young children don’t.
Nor do the dead.
By baptising
‘dead ancestors’ what you are really doing is taking away choice from the
living. Why follow the doctrine of any Church when you’re going to end up in
Mormon heaven someday anyway.
NIHIL OBSTAT: I have concluded that the materials
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane O'Brien, STL, Censor Librorum JULY, 2014
presented in this work are free of doctrinal or moral errors.
Bernadeane O'Brien, STL, Censor Librorum JULY, 2014
permission to publish this work is hereby granted.
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