Genealogies

Last week, our Sunday lesson was on genealogy, and learning how to trace our roots. I'll have to first admit that this is one area in which I'm sorely lacking. We Latter-day Saints are encouraged to trace back as far as we go and find all the links that we can. I believe it's one of the defining characteristics of our Church. Many know of our skills in tracking down our ancestry. And chances are, if you visit any ancestral website, its directors or employees are likely to consist of several members of my church.

So, why all this focus on our ancestors?

I, myself, asked this very question during our Sunday lesson. The Old Testament ends with this verse:

And he [Elijah] shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:6)

Our Doctrine and Covenants includes a revelation given in 1823 that references this same verse, but slightly changed, and almost with a sense of more urgency:

And he [Elijah] shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming. (D&C 2:2-3)

I've never understood why the urgency, and I still don't fully understand the curse or the wasting. It clearly seems to be important, but what I don't see so much is what would happen if we (the children) fail to turn to our "fathers." Why the importance? 

I don't ask the question because I wish to rebel and not do my genealogy, but because I seek understanding. If it weren't important, then it wouldn't be written -- "ignore and I'll smite you with a curse."

One thing to understand about my church -- we believe in being able to perform vicarious ordinances for our dead ancestors. If they failed to be baptized in their mortal life, we can perform the baptism in their behalf here on earth, and if they accept the baptism in the post-life spiritual world, then they can enjoy the same blessings of others who had been baptized. They can then enter into the Kingdom of God, and all that good stuff. So -- yeah -- I get it -- if we don't turn to our "fathers" and help them get into heaven, then what good are we? But the curse and/or warning seems larger than that.

Anyway -- I thought I'd share two quick stories from my own life that are special memories.

The first happened when I was a young kid -- I can't remember how old I was. My grandmother came down with her father, Great Grandpa Aiken, and we all went to Dahlonega, Georgia to look for where his own grandfather Jasper was buried. He had died near the end of the Civil War of some disease. It took all day, but my Great Grandpa didn't give up -- asking local people questions at their homes, searching graveyards for the tombstone -- visiting churches. Near the end of the day, we had found a church with a graveyard in the back, and there were two unmarked graves. The person attending the church pulled out the records and determined that the two people buried were unknown, but had died around the same time as Jasper. It felt like we were in the right place, but there was no proof. We had to end the search because the sun was setting and there was nowhere else to look.

To be honest, I think I was bored most of the time, but there were moments when I could see and understand what was going on -- the whole "turning to the fathers" thing -- searching for answers -- trying to learn more about ancestors -- people who had shared his genes. Eventually, more answers would be found later, but I learned that it was through the search that we can grow. It's not just about saving our ancestors, but also learning more about ourselves.

And the second memory comes from a couple of years ago when I joined my ward's effort to beef up our indexing efforts. "Indexing" is what we call the manual digitization of official document facsimiles. We have some AI that tries to read these documents, but we humans can volunteer to proof and translate the documents where the AI fails.

In particular, the queue mentioned a batch of German death records. I don't know that much German, but figured I could give it a shot. The page I was given was a big mess. Messy handwriting, and words I didn't understand. There were about 30-40 names on that one form, and for each name I was supposed to provide certain information -- sex, age, date of death, etc. And I was struggling with the age, as it appeared that some critical information was missing. The age was in two (or three columns). The first column was seldom populated, and the second column was always populated. It took me a while to translate the column headings -- the first column was "years" and the second was "months," but I didn't understand why the most important one -- years -- was missing. It didn't seem right -- I was wrong about something.

I also had to figure out the sex. It took me an hour to decipher the characters and to learn that sohn meant "son" and tochter was "daughter." But many of these had an extra suffix ... sohnlein and tochterlein. What did it mean? And did I have the right characters from the messy handwriting? And then it hit me ...

The suffix lein means "little one." For each "lein" the year column was missing its number. It wasn't because the number was missing. The vast majority of the deaths listed on that form were infants who had not finished their first year of life. I had my answer -- all of their ages were 0. At the same time, it was like a door opened up and I could feel the grief of the parents rising from the dust -- after some major incident had occurred that killed many infants. Perhaps I would have missed all this if I didn't struggle with the German and the handwriting.

Do you have similar stories of genealogy? In my case it seems I've only just begun on my journey to reach out to my ancestors. Now that I'm older, it's like I want to understand more about where I came from. In my earlier years, I could hardly care less, but now I really want to know.