Genealogy Databases in Salt Lake City, Utah
In the July/August 2005 issue of The Atlantic, Bernard-Henri Lévy traced the steps of Tocqueville and passed through Salt Lake City, Utah where intensive genealogical research is taking place. At the Family History Library, the International Genealogical Index is being compiled.
“We take everything,” the [Family History Library] librarian tells me. Everything. Birth certificates. Marriage and death certificates. Newspapers. Old letters. Photos. Civil and parish registers. Military papers. Ancestral diagrams. Family trees. Censuses. Land registries. Immigration and emigration lists. Court reports. We have emissaries who travel the planet. We have “microfilm teams” who go sign deals and collect material. The result is a unique data bank. It’s a supply of billions of names entered in our International Genealogical Index and preserved here in the library as well as, for security purposes, in a place twenty-five miles southeast of the city, in the heart of Granite Mountain, in fortified rooms hollowed out of the mountainside, guaranteed earthquake-proof. Someday the dead from every era will be entered into the computer. Someday a history of humanity will be indexed and available for any living person who wants it. Come look. You’ll understand.
Also in Salt Lake City, the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation (SMGF) has created a database of 2.5 million records of DNA-family history data along with a free, interactive Web site.
The project is a multicultural, multiracial and ecumenical endeavor that collaborates internationally with diverse universities on a database that includes genetic-genealogy information from around the globe.
“Our project is the only one that links living individuals by DNA to specific names of ancestors going back six or eight generations or further,” said Dr. Scott Woodward. “The foundation has a different purpose than the recently announced Genographic Project of National Geographic. Our database links an individual’s genetic profile to specific ancestors by name, while the Genographic Project links a living individual to locations and broad human migration trends over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.”
I have fond memories of Salt Lake City from a trip my family made when I was in grade school. There was a crafts store that encouraged one of my life-long hobbies (embroidery and cross stitch) and it looks as if the city also supports my other passion – genetics.
BusinessWire, September 6, 2005
My good friend’s mother went to Salt Lake expressly for the purpose of dabbling her fingers in the genealogical records there. They may have a religious imperative for collecting all that data, but it’s pretty cool they let anybody else have access to it also.
Q, The Mormon religion is definitely the driving force behind these efforts which means they’re not want for finances!