Family History Makes Strange Bedfellows

Next November, cousins Mark Udall and Tom Udall will be running for the Senate, and their second cousin, Gordon Smith, will be running for reelection to the same body. The Udalls are Democrats, Smith a Republican.

The Udalls are descendants of one David King Udall, who as a year-old child was brought by his parents on the trek to Utah led by Brigham Young. As a young man, he was sent to Arizona and lived to be president of the Mormons' Mesa, Ariz., temple until 1934.

Having taken two wives, David Udall ran afoul of territorial law enforcement officials in the 1880s. He served a brief term for perjury, having to do with an affidavit filed on a land claim by one Miles Romney -- Mitt Romney's great-grandfather.

Baron Goldwater, uncle of the future senator and father of modern conservatism, bailed David Udall out of jail. [Link]

Some Family Reviewed

Donald Harman Akenson's new book—Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself—gets reviewed in today's Globe and Mail. It's going on my Christmas wish list.

"The Saints," [Joseph] Smith wrote in 1840, "have the privilege of being baptized for those of their relatives who are dead, whom they believe would have embraced the Gospel, if they had been privileged with hearing it." This sent the faithful back to their family Bibles for the names and dates of their ancestors. The great genealogical treasure hunt had begun.

In 1918, the Mormons expanded their mission, trawling for names among non- Mormons and baptizing them once their exact place in the tree of life had been determined. The practice continues to this day, spurred on by the wish to save as many souls as possible.

Though the Mormons have instituted an admirable double-blind system for vetting new names, slipups are inevitable, and Akenson gives a few that are absolute howlers. The most laughable by far are the attempts to find a genealogy for the Norse gods Odin and Frigg, reported as having lived in "Asgard, Asia, or Eastern Europe." [Link]

Romney's a Deserter's Descendant

Genealogical muckraking is again rocking the world of presidential politics.

[E]xactly 150 years ago, an ancestor of Mitt Romney deserted from U.S. Army troops sent to put down a purported Mormon rebellion in Utah.

Carl Heinrich (Charles Henry) Wilcken, Romney's great-great-grandfather, would give Mormons information about approaching troops, eventually joined the LDS Church and ultimately became a bodyguard and confidant of two church presidents.

The middle name of Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George W. Romney (also once a presidential candidate), is Wilcken, after that soldier-ancestor. [Link]

Time for Family Feud to Be Cancelled

Gracia Jones—a great-great-granddaughter of LDS church founder Joseph Smith—is among those trying to heal a long-standing rift between his descendants and those of Brigham Young. It all started with Smith's death in 1844.

While Young led the LDS migration to the Salt Lake Valley, Emma Smith remained behind and eventually re-married. One of her sons led a splinter group known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Consequently, none of Smith's descendants were affiliated with the original body of Latter-day Saints until Jones discovered her ancestry and joined 51 years ago.

Ill will has persisted among some descendants of the families for more than a century and a half, Jones said. When planning a reunion of their family members, Smith descendants "talked about the difficulty that children of the family had with Brigham Young and the harsh feelings that had filtered down and left a scar on the family because of the bitterness the children held against him," Jones said. [Link]

The LDS and the KGB

James W. Anderson tells how the LDS Church got help from the KGB when they ran low on cameras while microfilming records in the former Soviet Union.

Historically, the Communist governments felt they did not want to rely on the West for their equipment, goods, or services, so they made their own of just about everything. In music, they knocked off the Hammond B3 organ, and in microfilming, they knocked off the Kodak cameras the LDS Church was using among many other businesses and groups.

But the cameras still took the standard size film, and they soon were put to work filming anything that could be found. There is a vast quantity of records still there, and at the outset they soon had, thanks to the old KGB cameras, ... 40 operational throughout Russia and other areas almost right away. [Link]

Mitt's Mexican Cousin

Today's Boston Globe has a story about the side of the Romney family that remained in Mexico after Mitt's ancestors returned to America.

Mike Romney, a school administrator in this small town in the Mexican desert, and Mitt Romney, a candidate for president of the United States, have never met.

But the two distant cousins are just a year apart in age, and both are descendants of the same great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, who fled the United States and, at the direction of church leaders, helped create this colony 122 years ago as a refuge for polygamous Mormons. [Link]

Empty Wallet Full of History

Russell Martin Harris has donated to the Mormon church a wallet carried by his great-great-grandfather.

It was that ancestor, Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to get the $3,000 needed to print the first 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon, the central text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Family folklore holds that the soft, caramel-brown wallet carried the cash to the printer, Russell Harris said.

Through the years, Russell Harris has shared that same story, showing off the wallet to small groups.

"Everybody wanted to open the billfold and see if the money was still there," Russell Harris said. "It was always empty." [Link]

The Sins of the Great-Grandfather

Among the weighty issues being debated in the press are whether Barack Obama is black enough to be president, and whether Mitt Romney's great-grandfather is fit to be the great-grandfather of a president.

Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.

Romney's great-grandmother, Hannah Hood Hill, was the daughter of polygamists. She wrote vividly in her autobiography about how she "used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow" over her own husband's multiple marriages. [Link]

The Pope and Mrs. Pacelli

The Mormon practice of baptizing the dead by proxy is again in the news, with perennial critic Helen Radkey reprising her role as self-appointed watchdog. Apparently some overeager church members have given certain celebrated celibates imaginary wives.

Pope Pius XII was baptized three times and also "sealed" in eternal marriage to a fictional Mrs Eugenio Pacelli. Saint Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order of priests, was also "sealed" to a bogus wife. Catholic clergy do not marry. [Link]

Index Left Out

Archivists looking for ways to preserve digital art have gone to the depths of the earth looking for answers.

[T]he Long Now Foundation has visited the Mormon Church's genealogical archive kept buried in a vault in Utah's Cottonwood Canyon. The church is building an archive of all the world's genealogical data on microfiche in a vault designed to last at least 1,000 years. Still, the data in the vault doesn't have an internal index, according to those at the Long Now Foundation who visited the site. "The index of where things are is in an Oracle database outside the vault. And without an index for the vault, (the data) is useless," one executive said. [Link]

Useless? Lock me in there with a microfilm reader and a lifetime supply of doughnuts and I'll die a happy man.

Governor Lags Behind His Ancestors

The Salt Lake Tribune has turned up plenty of polygamists in Mitt Romney's family history, but the Massachusetts governor insists that marriage is between a man and a woman—not between a man and seventeen women.

Romney's great-great grandfather on his paternal grandmother's side is a famous Mormon from the settling of the western realm of Deseret (part of which later became Utah), where followers fled in the 1800s to escape anti-Mormon persecution fueled, in part, by opposition to polygamy.

Parley P. Pratt was one of the influential LDS Church leaders during the early years. He married 12 times, though his first wife died before he took a second. A former husband of one of his plural wives eventually killed Pratt. [Link]

... thus proving that polygamy can be fatal.

A DNA Dilemma

DNA evidence that Native Americans came from Asia and not the Middle East is testing the faith of some Mormons, who've been taught that American Indians descended from a lost tribe of Israel.

For those outside the faith, the depth of the church's dilemma can be explained this way: Imagine if DNA evidence revealed that the Pilgrims didn't sail from Europe to escape religious persecution but rather were part of a migration from Iceland — and that U.S. history books were wrong. [Link, via OakvilleBlackWalnut]

Of course, we know that the Pilgrims did not come from Norse-infested Iceland, because they wore hats with shiny buckles and not horny Viking helmets.

[tagged: genealogy, family tree, ancestry]

Humble Birthplace Marked By 38-Foot Monument

From The Washington (D.C.) Post:

Millions of Mormons Fete Founder's Birth

By JENNIFER DOBNER
The Associated Press
Friday, December 23, 2005; 3:55 AM

SHARON, Vt. -- On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Mormon church founder Joseph Smith's birth, church President Gordon B. Hinckley voyaged to the Vermont hillside where Smith was believed to have been born.

Looking up at the monument built in Smith's honor, he had just one observation: "Beautiful."

[snip]

Records from Smith family diaries place his birth on Dec. 23, 1805 on the country hillside, near the New Hampshire border. A hearthstone and a moss-covered front step are all that remain of the original home where the Smith family ran a small farm.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built and dedicated the 38 1/2-foot monument to Smith — one foot of granite for each year of his life — in 1905.

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree

A Tasty Way to be Tarred and Feathered

From the (Mesa, Ariz.) East Valley Tribune:

Gilbert Ward connects with ancestors by re-enacting Mormon trek

By Lawn Griffiths, Tribune
November 12, 2005

Something unexpected happened near Coolidge when families of a Gilbert Mormon ward re-enacted the historic and rigorous handcart journeys of Mormon pioneers across the West.

As planned for the second day, a mob with blackened faces and bandanna masks ambushed the handcart companies. They fired blanks and demanded that Joseph Smith be turned over to them to be tarred and feathered.

According to script, a 16-year-old boy stepped forward to receive the abuse in Smith’s stead and was covered in chocolate pudding and feathers.

But children (ages 7 to 11) on the trek "thought this was real, they really thought the men were there to hurt their prophet," said trek organizer Jeanine Smith, no relation to Joseph. "The children attacked the mob with poles they used to pull their handcarts."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

From Cross-Dressing Rocker to FHC Librarian

From Film Threat:

NEW YORK DOLL

by Phil Hall
(2005-10-25)

2005, Rated PG-13, 78 Minutes, A First Independent Pictures Release

Watching the mild-mannered, seemingly befuddled Arthur Kane sitting quietly in the back of a Los Angeles municipal bus, it is impossible to imagine that this 55-year-old librarian was once among the most influential figures in rock history.

[snip]

When The New York Dolls split in 1975, Kane’s career began its tailspin.

[snip]

Redemption came from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a.k.a. the Mormons. Answering an advertisement, he was visited by missionaries and found his path to salvation. It was a somewhat low-budget path, including a part-time job as a librarian in the church’s Family History Center library, but it was enough to give him the chance to begin anew.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Dunking 'Do Nots' Denied

From Salt Lake City (Utah) Weekly of Oct. 20, 2005:

Font of Frustration

After years of prodding the LDS Church over its baptismal records, Helen Radkey alleges she’s been locked out of the church database.

by Jamie Gadette

Just call Helen Radkey obsessed.

The local independent researcher spent the greater part of 11 years monitoring The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ baptismal records for names of Jewish Holocaust victims, survivors and famous Jews. During that period, she found evidence that church officials have repeatedly broken and renewed promises to stop “dunking,” or subjecting the names of deceased Jews to the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead.

[snip]

This May, Radkey discovered that, among other prominent figures, Anne Frank is still on record for posthumous cleansing under God. Then, shortly afterward, Radkey alleges she was blocked from accessing the LDS Church’s database of posthumous baptisms, the International Genealogical Index (IGI). Prior to the alleged lockout, however, she collected evidence supporting claims that, when it comes to respecting Jewish requests, the LDS Church is all talk.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

LDS vs. DNA

From The (Provo, Utah) Daily Herald of Aug. 5, 2005:

Author excommunicated from LDS Church

Jennifer Dobner THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SALT LAKE CITY -- The Australian author who wrote that DNA evidence fails to support the ancestral claims outlined in the Book of Mormon has been excommunicated by The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[snip]

Southerton was charged by church authorities with adultery but finally excommunicated for "having an inappropriate relationship with a woman," he said. Southerton doesn't deny the relationship, which occurred two years ago, while he was separated from his wife.

[snip]

Southerton said he refused to discuss his personal life with church leaders on Sunday, instead asking them why he was not answering to charges of apostasy for having widely published on the Internet and in his book his doubts about the church and his beliefs about DNA science.

[snip]

His book, published in 2004, outlines how existing DNA data for American Indians does not support the LDS beliefs that the continent's earliest inhabitants were descendants of Israelite patriarch Lehi.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]