I recall that the Mormons (LDS) did have a religious basis for wanting to know
as much as possible about their ancestors. Whether or not one agrees with that
reasoning, genealogists in general still owe a lot of thanks (or a debt of
gratitude) to the Mormons for going to all their continuing efforts to further
genealogy in general, such as by gathering large sets of records that anyone can
research, and such as by creating and providing for free (I believe) relatively
high-quality tools for the research, both the GEDCOM format and the Personal
Ancestral File program. -- Darren Duncan
Lewis Kirk wrote:
I have become queasy about the whole online genealogy thing. Ancestry would
not let me go even after I ended my membership. I finally retired the email
address they had for me. (I have a lot of email addresses just for that
reason!). The gedcom format was developed by the LDS. Ancestry and just about
all the other genealogy sites are based out of Utah and owned by Ancestry.
The LDS church has a peculiar habit of posthumously baptizing people. The
gedcom records for my family that were on Ancestry.com had posthumously
baptized a number of my ancestors. I know it's really put me off of using
those services.
I really am not posting this to start a great debate or flame war or
whatever. Do your own research and come up with your own conclusions if you
care to. Wikipedia has a good article on the company and on posthumous
baptism.
