The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  While the LDS is transferring its data from microfilm to digital storage, it is not making any assumptions that digital will be the final version. “People have been talking about digital preservation for a long time, but no one has actually been building the systems to do it,” Verkler observed. “We think that polyester-based microfilm will last for somewhere between three to five hundred years. For digital, the bytes will rot off the media that you create—within ten to twenty years on DVDs, for instance. All these CDs that people are burning and think that they’re going to last for a long time, they’re not. They’re going to be unreadable.”

  • • •

  What if there were a huge natural disaster, and everything outside the Granite Mountain Records Vault were destroyed? Future historians could retrieve the mountain’s records and re-create many hundreds of years of demographic history. Would they also discover that most humans from all of history were, in fact, Mormons?

  In the 1990s a Mormon group started working its way through all the names of the victims of the Holocaust, apparently baptizing them into the LDS. The controversy that erupted was resolved by a 1995 agreement between Jewish leaders and the LDS, whereby the church agreed to remove the names of posthumously baptized Jewish people from its records. But in the years that followed many Jewish names found their way back into them.

  In 2003 an Armenian group protested that the LDS had baptized by proxy notable members of its community as well. In 2008 the Vatican sent a letter to parishes all over the world asking them to not share their records with Mormon genealogists. In 2012 it was widely reported that Anne Frank had been posthumously baptized into the Mormon Church. Similar stories emerged. Stanley Ann Dunham, the late mother of Barack Obama; Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted and murdered in Pakistan in 2002; Adolf Hitler; Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter; and Steve Irwin, the Australian TV naturalist, had all been baptized.

  I asked Jay Verkler about proxy baptism. It was a misnomer, he explained: Members of the church offer baptism to their ancestors. These ancestors are then checked off a list that notes that they have received an offer. That list is different, he said, from the “Members of Record” database, which includes only the names of people who have officially, during life, accepted such an offer.

  Nevertheless, Verkler said, Frank had probably been offered what the church calls proxy ordinance about one hundred times. Members are supposed to offer proxy ordinance only to their own ancestors, but the policy has occasionally been abused. “What happens is that a member is reading about Anne Frank and [he] says, ‘Boy, I hope someone has made this offer to her. I think I will.’ And they go and they take care of it. Sometimes people get a little misdirected there.”

  Mormons, explained Verkler, have warm associations with the idea of baptism. He understands that many Jews do not. “There were some really awful things that have been done to the Jewish community. Jews were forced to be baptized or burned at the stake, so ‘baptism’ is not a happy word. We didn’t understand that for a while, I think, culturally.” (As one Jewish genealogist confirmed to me, “The whole idea of proxy baptism is incredibly offensive for Jewish people.”)

  “On the other hand,” Verkler said, “if you think about other religions that light a candle and say a prayer for someone, or create a prayer for someone who is deceased, it’s not a unique pattern, so that same kind of motivation is what I think motivates people.”

  The same motivation may be involved, but as many Jews have pointed out, when they light a candle, they don’t make a record of it. The practice remains a point of tension between the two faiths, especially as there is a large Jewish genealogical community that relies on the resources created by the LDS.

  Future historians of the Granite Mountain Records Vault may also be surprised to find that only heterosexual people married and had children in the early twenty-first century. Within the last two years, a growing series of online complaints have noted that people who want to record marriages of family members who are the same sex cannot because the software won’t record the union. Which is to say, the family tree database won’t allow users to report a marriage unless it takes place between a man and a woman. If this is the only database that survives a catastrophe, it will offer a skewed picture of life in our time.

  Remember Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the illegitimate daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond? She said, “There are many stories like Sally Hemings and mine. [Hemings, a slave, had children fathered by the United States president Thomas Jefferson. See chapter 11.] The unfortunate measure is that not everyone knows about these stories that helped to make America what it is today.” What America is today is a nation in which same-sex marriage has been recognized in seventeen states and eight Native American tribal jurisdictions. The federal government of the United States recognizes gay marriage, as do those of at least nineteen other countries. In the United States alone there are at least 220,000 children being raised by same-sex couples. But because the LDS software won’t register these unions, all those American stories will have been lost, and the database of millions is no longer a real record, because it doesn’t record what’s real.

  • • •

  If it weren’t for Ancestry.com, Geoff Meyer, who was raised in the awful orphanages of the twentieth century, would never have found the smallest scrap of information about his father. Meyer’s experience may be unusual, but he is one of millions for whom the organization fills a need. Based in Provo, Utah, with a large office in San Francisco, the company’s TV ads feature friendly middle-aged people stumbling on the fact that their grandparents’ wedding took place just a few months before their first child’s birth; or becoming overwhelmed with emotion when they discover a fact about a loved parent who is gone; or being thrilled by a coincidental crossed path, like the fact that they lived only four blocks away from an ancestor that they never met.

  The Mormons help many people around the world because of their spiritual mission. The mission of Ancestry.com may be rather more secular, but it is no less powerful. As one genealogist observed to me, it’s not about the “begats” anymore; it’s more about the stories. Certainly Ancestry.com has addressed that need. Most people in the field now are talking about taking it beyond the scholarly pursuit. “That’s the classic genealogist,” Dan Jones at Ancestry.com told me. “If we’re saying that the interest in who we are or where we come from, the interest in identity, is universal, then the interest in trolling through microfilm certainly isn’t universal, and it’s certainly not endemic throughout every life stage.”

  Ancestry sponsors many genealogy expos all over the world, some of which are attended by hundreds of thousands of people. Jones, who is often on the front line at these events, says the fascination with genealogy is expressed in different ways in different cultures. As closely related as the Americans and the British are, there are still powerful distinctions in what appeals to them about genealogy, or at least in what they say appeals to them. Advertising for Ancestry.com in the United States highlights the emotional or the scandalous nature of revelations. But, explained Jones (who is from Wales), “You put that in front of the British audience, and they’re like, Oh my God, you got to pay to be emotionally damaged? Why would I do that?” Ancestry runs focus groups in all of its markets to determine how particular cultures prefer to think about their personalized past. “The British take on it,” Jones told me, “seems to be, No, it’s not; it’s not emotional at all. I just want my facts here on this paper, and I want to be able to give it to my offspring and my grandchildren and tell them where they came from. It’s not the story of me; it’s the story of them.” He tapped the table to make the point. “Those people on those pages.”

  At expos Jones often finds himself talking to people who are keen to connect. He helps them try to find relatives in the database, and it can end up being quite an intimate way to talk to strangers. “You’re doing lookups for people and you in
form some lady at three in the afternoon that it’s highly likely that her grandfather was a bigamist. You can’t say it’s true,” said Jones, but “you explain to her how difficult it was to get divorced in 1898, and yet when people got to the point where they couldn’t stand the sight of each other, what did they do? Quite likely you just move twelve miles away to another town and have another family.

  “People want to talk about it,” said Jones, “because so many of them turn up. They may be fully aware their grandmother was a bigamist, but they want to speak to you about it and tell you about their experience of finding it. I think that goes to the heart of what Ancestry.com is for people. It’s a way for them to find their place in the world.”

  Still, Ancestry.com isn’t just a historical matchmaking service—it’s a massive data company, because modern genealogy, of course, is the Big Data of little people. And however much eugenics and Nazi catastrophes have shaped the distaste and anxiety people feel about family history today, and however much the New World still burns to declare its independence from the old, genealogy companies have quietly and steadily expanded to become some of the biggest data organizations of the twenty-first century.

  • • •

  Ancestry.com began in the United States and now has big followings in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. When I visited its San Francisco office, Dan Jones told me that the company was “exceptionally well represented in the Western English-speaking world.” This is not merely a matter of particularly interested audiences but also reflects the fact that, because of their political structures, these countries also have good, easily available civil records. Ancestry.com also has a presence in many other countries, including Sweden (Ancestry.se), and is currently trying to expand into Mexico.

  Overall the company’s holdings include twelve billion records. (It defines a record as a piece of information, like a birth date or a marriage location.) Like the Mormons, it makes copies of government, census, and other civil records from all over the world. In 2012, when the 1940 census was released to the public, it took Ancestry.com less than four months to get the entire 132 million records online—not just names and dates but all the information recorded in the census. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted the famous science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who worried that the production of information in the human world far outpaced our ability to organize and digest it. Heinlein issued his warning in the 1950s, long before personal computers and the Internet and the genome and Big Data, all of which have made the problem exponentially larger. So far Ancestry.com’s solution has been to get millions of people from all over the world to use their personal knowledge and detective skills to connect and sort much of the data themselves. A considerable portion of its twelve billion bits of information are documents added by users.

  As far as Ancestry.com’s total holdings go, they are shaped by money and the way it flows. China, for example, has always been one of the best record-keeping nations, and although there are more than 1.3 billion Chinese people in the world, there aren’t enough to create a market for Western-style family history. “If you look at the demographics,” Jones said, “42 million Americans have German ancestry. There’s 3.7 million with Chinese ancestry. We could acquire a ton of Chinese content, but the East Asian community in the U.S. isn’t that big outside San Francisco, and if you look at the UK, nearly all the migration comes from Hong Kong.”

  This is all taking place in a world where there is exponentially more data than there ever has been. Facebook is another example of the way that millions of people across the world now document and share their own lives. (Indeed, many genealogists believe Facebook, where users connect with friends and post updates about their personal lives, is the beginning phase of developing an interest in family history.) Self-recorded personal data is just one side of the Big Data coin: The other is the data that everyone else is keeping on us, whether it’s the retailers who track our purchases, the insurance companies who monitor our health, Google, or the government. The biggest Big Data scandal of 2012 was the revelation that what the people with tinfoil on their heads have been telling us for years is more or less true—they are listening to everything. The NSA has been surreptitiously monitoring the phone and Internet use of millions of ordinary Americans as well as of foreign powers for years.

  Of course, what makes all the stories, events, and moments in our lives available as data that can be published is the fact that all this information is now digital, and none of this would be happening without the Internet. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of California reported that 2002 marked the beginning of the digital age: It was in that year that digital storage capacity became bigger than analog for the first time. Now, according to the researchers, 94 percent of all our stored information is digital.

  By making copies of records and digitizing them for their users, family-history companies are in many cases the only ones making an effort to keep this data alive. In some countries it’s not an easy task. In Italy, as in many European nations, the communities are so richly endowed with records of the past that they don’t spend a lot of time looking after them. One Ancestry.com representative showed me a photograph of some ancient Italian civil registries piled up on the cistern of a flooded toilet. Artifacts like these are endangered all over the world.

  As enormous a quantity as Ancestry.com’s ten billion records seems, they are only a fraction of the records that exist. There are millions of undigitized documents in large archives all over the world, and frankly, it’s hard to overstate their inaccessibility. To find something you often have to access a search aid that is in another room, if you are lucky, and potentially in another building; you will probably have to wait for the one day of the week (or even the month) that the person who is a specialist in interpreting those documents is paid to come in.

  Yet someday all of these documents may actually be connected, or connectable. It wasn’t until the existence of the Internet that we even conceived the notion of considering them as a single body of information. In fact they constitute an enormous infosphere that hangs quietly looming next to the world of people. As we find ways to read, organize, and connect all this data, we can map patterns, develop insights, apply analysis, and make predictions. This is true of any information we can obtain about the past, but when it is digitally stored, it can be searched almost effortlessly, uncovering data points that would have taken years to discern in physical media, and applying the tools of data analysis can produce more data about our data. This is probably especially true for family history, because a family is essentially a network where individuals are connected by bloodlines.

  Kevin Schurer of the University of Leicester, previously director of the UK Data Archive, examined census data for his PhD in 1988. While demographers and historians have often used such records, because they had to be transcribed and then physically input into a computer, “it was a very time consuming process and it limited what you could and couldn’t do,” Schurer explained. Recently Schurer made a deal with the United Kingdom’s largest genealogy company, FindMyPast, whereby he cleaned up and coded about 215 million records from their late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century census data and in return was able to use the data for his research and to make it available to other academic researchers.

  “When you have a hundred-percent count data,” Schurer said, “that allows you to start looking at things which would be too small to analyze locally. To give you an example, one of the things which are captured in the censuses is disability, whether or not you’re blind, deaf, dumb, or whether you suffer from a mental frailty. This has never, ever been fully analyzed. Why? Because when you look at any one place, invariably you just might only have one or two blind people, so you can’t actually look at it until you look at the whole country.”

  Schurer began to draw maps of the incidence of deafness, mutism, blindness, and mental frailty. The preparation of the data took four yea
rs, and the analyses have only just begun. But it’s already clear that there will be rich findings. “If you think about it, you should expect this to be evenly spread across the country, but it isn’t. It is actually very geographically skewed,” Schurer noted. He suspects that the occurrence of blindness and deafness may be explained not by genetics but by occupation: The mining industry likely contributed to their high incidence in some locations.

  The Big Data analysis of little people could change the way a subject like migration is studied. Because you can better chart in-migration and out-migration patterns, said Schurer, “it allows you to understand the link between migration and economic development much more fully.” Data also enables tracking in much greater detail of how the economy changed throughout the nineteenth century, rural depopulation, and household statistics and fertility. In fact, Schurer said, “You name it, these data will give us a much greater idea of historical processes in the past for several areas of research.” In 2013 another researcher used family tree databases to build an enormous family tree, including one pedigree that begins in the fifteenth century and has thirteen million people in it. The anonymized tree is available to researchers who want to study demographics, longevity, and fertility.

  The typical deal that Ancestry.com makes with archives is to digitize their records while leaving the original physical records freely accessible, so people who prefer to search by hand can still do that. But the company charges for online access. Everything Ancestry has created is added to the original record series, Jones said. Often there’s a free, somewhat limited public-library online version as well. While access to such archives is critical for both the government and academia, said Jones, the overwhelming majority of the stakeholders in any archive are genealogists, so their most vital users are personal historians. With governments and corporations throughout the world pulling funding from their archives, if Ancestry.com, Geni, and other genealogy companies weren’t investing in them, no one would be.