The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  The mountain now holds parish records and old English manuscripts dating from the 1500s, including records from London, when civil registration began in 1837, and copies of jai pu, Chinese family records, which date back before AD 1. Overall the data the Mormons have gathered is equivalent to thirty-two times the amount of information contained in the Library of Congress—and the church adds a new Library of Congress’s worth of new data every year.

  This massive infoverse exists to serve Joseph Smith’s late-nineteenth-century teaching that church members should offer baptism to dead relatives. Because members may only carry out the rite for their own ancestors, all church members now spend a great deal of time tracing their lineages back through time. Have humans ever built anything of this magnitude without an eye on the afterlife?

  • • •

  Fifteen miles away from the vault, in the clean streets of Salt Lake City, I met with Jay Verkler at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. Built originally as a grand hotel in 1909, the structure stands next to the white, Disney castle–like Mormon Temple. When we met, Verkler was the CEO of Family Search, the Mormon organization that manages the vault’s records and promotes genealogy throughout the world. Once a gifted twelve-year-old who wrote software for the bank where his father worked, Verkler became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur until the church’s elders summoned him back to Salt Lake City. Verkler is of an imposing height, and he has a thick helmet of blond hair (which, at a recent genetic genealogy conference hosted by the LDS, had its own Twitter feed, @JayVerklersHair). He looks exactly like the kind of modestly presented, clean-living Mormon missionary you might find knocking on your front door. His command of the intricacies of information storage in an ever-decaying world combined with an implacable commitment to the eternal ideals of the church make him a powerful presence. More than any other organization his church has shaped how genealogy is practiced in the world today.

  “The core concept of why this church cares so much about genealogy stems back to the notion that families can be eternal organizations past death,” Verkler explained. “Members of the church seek out their ancestors because we think we have a duty to them to help them understand this gospel that we understand, and we think we can actually be together.”

  The idea was magically appealing. At the time, my own boys were so young that I could scarcely imagine a time or place where I would not be present for them. As Verkler continued to talk theology, I mused at how brilliant a basis this was for a religion. What parents would not want to believe that they could be with their children forever?

  Of course, if entire families are destined to be together in the afterlife, that would include parents and siblings and their spouses and children, aunts and uncles, and in-laws. Is this afterlife going to look like some kind of celestial neighborhood where the streets map out bloodlines, with entire apartment blocks assigned to close families? Or will it be more like a perpetual Thanksgiving feast designed by M. C. Escher after a bad night’s sleep?

  “We’re not quite sure how it’s going to work,” Verkler admitted. “It’s not going to be like one big group family, but we think those connections will still exist in the afterlife.”

  The LDS philosophy is about not just the next stage of existence but life before the afterlife too. “We think there’s a strengthening of you as a human when you know who you came from and where your roots are and when you respect that part,” said Verkler. He surely speaks the truth, because some of the Mormons I met in Salt Lake City were the friendliest people I have ever come across, respectful and polite to a most disarming degree.

  Over the last ten years Marshall Duke, a psychologist from Emory University, has explored the value of family history in the lives of children. He developed a list of twenty questions such as “Do you know where your parents met?” “Do you know which person in your family you most look like?” and “Do you know some of the jobs that your parents had when they were young?” Duke found that the higher children scored on the family-history test, the higher they also scored on measures of self-esteem and self-control and the lower they scored on anxiety, among other measures. Duke even looked at children who experienced the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. Even in this extreme case, knowledge of family history appeared to indicate how resilient the children were in the months that followed. Duke explains that it’s not necessarily the facts of the family that give children these qualities but the fact that, if children can answer these questions, it usually means that they have strong connections with mothers and grandmothers and that significant amounts of time have been spent communicating at family dinners and on family vacations. All the stories of a family add up to what Duke calls an intergenerational self, which he associates with personal strength.

  All the industry that the Mormons have devoted to assembling genealogical records is not just for church members. “We provide our records for everybody,” Verkler explained. “We think that it’s doing good for the world.” Accordingly, there are more than 3,400 Family History Centers in the world. They are a sacred municipal library system, and anyone who wishes to research his family history can make use of them. Smart, kindly people will help him search historical documentation such as birth records, death certificates, land records, and any other document that might establish a genealogical connection. A borrowing system between the centers and the main Family History Library in Salt Lake City means that if your local center doesn’t have the record you are after, another might be able to copy it onto a disk and send it.

  In this respect too the LDS differs from all other religions. Its kind of twenty-first-century munificence requires an extremely sophisticated understanding of informatics and digitizing. Trying to determine and then store everyone’s name and existence for perpetuity is also an insanely costly process. Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format. The LDS drove microfilm technology in the twentieth century, and today it is a leader in digital data storage. Its digital camera operators photograph records and get those images online within two days, and then an enormous army—that is to say, hundreds of thousands—of volunteers index the files and make them searchable. The Mormons were crowdsourcing long before the word was invented.

  The last time I visited the church, it was deeply engaged in its biggest project to date—a joint effort with the national archives of Italy in which more than one hundred Italian state archives gave the LDS teams access to all the birth, death, and marriage records from 1800 through to 1940. LDS photographers have taken more than three million images of the files, which recorded the lives of five hundred to seven hundred million Italians from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They included people who lived before the invention of photography, people who watched their children die of the flu in 1918, and people who years later themselves died at the end of World War II. It is the most definitive collection of Italian civil records in the world.

  The church’s most ambitious project is its online tree. Anyone who logs in to Family Search may record and research his or her family history there, but what distinguishes this tree from all the other online services is that the church is trying to connect all the branches, using its massive records and the activities of users to build a big tree of all of humanity. The endeavor must be, to some extent, possible. If anyone has the records to create this structure—a family history of all of the documented individual members of the human race, this group does. But the distinctive element of the LDS tree is that it’s collaborative: People can log on and add names and link them to documents and write personal stories—and once they have done that, their fifth cousin once removed may also jump online and edit that information, changing a relative’s name, linking it to other documents, or deleting the story altogether. No one I spoke to at Family Search seemed to think this would be a p
roblem, but surely everyone’s version of her own family is different from that of her cousins?

  Still, even if the online tree is in constant flux, the names and lives of millions of people will stay safe in the vault long after the names chiseled into all the world’s gravestones have eroded to nothing. The Mormon records will last for a very long time, at least until a natural disaster occurs, or maybe until some point in the process when a human being makes a mistake.

  • • •

  In 2004 Cyclone Heta, a record-breaking category 5 storm, hit the South Pacific island of Niue, the world’s smallest nation. Heta’s wind gusted at up to 177 miles per hour, and the waves it sent over the island have since been described in a technical report as “extremely very high.” The storm washed seventy homes and businesses over a ninety-foot cliff into the sea, and salt carried by the wind destroyed crops and vegetation. Overall eighty million dollars’ worth of damage was done, and not just to the residential and commercial parts of the island. All of the small nation’s birth, death, and court archives were destroyed. But because the Niue government had stored many of the island’s genealogical records with the LDS in the Granite Mountain Records Vault in 1994, it was able to retrieve copies of them.

  The biggest problem with data, once it is collected, is how to preserve it. Because we mere mortals have only the most tenuous mental grasp on the passage of time and our tiny place in it, we tend not to recognize the basic existential truth that, as time passes, stuff gets lost. People forget where they put things. Nations forget where they stored things. Important documents are thrown out. Other important documents are suppressed. Buildings are bombed. They flood or burn down. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the city’s birth, death, and marriage documents. In 1922 the Public Records Office of Ireland was incinerated, and now only a few documents from before that time remain. Sometimes we lose not information itself but the information that would have helped provide a context for the information that we do possess.

  Preservation is made even harder by how rapidly technology rolls over. It is often the case that shortly after we invent a new process for recording information, a better one appears, and all the data so carefully stored in the original medium must now be transferred. Consider the fact that as a child, the typical forty-five-year-old used to listen to music on eight-track tapes or vinyl albums. He then recorded his albums onto cassette tapes. Later he tossed out both the albums and the tapes and bought the same music on compact discs. Now CDs are rapidly disappearing, and the same people have begun downloading their music as a digital file. If someone still happened to have an eight-track copy of, say, the Beatles’ White Album, it’s unlikely he would still have the machine to play it on. If he ever wanted to listen to his old recording of “Blackbird” again, he’d have to hunt down an eight-track player or build one himself.

  The problem of rapidly evolving technologies or “digital migration” was rather alarmingly illustrated in England in the 1980s with a considerably larger amount of information. Actually, it began in 1086 with the Domesday Book. The first public record ever made in England, the Domesday Book was instigated by William the Conqueror, who wished to take a census of his people and, more specifically, their possessions. He dispatched men to all corners of the realm to record how much land and how many animals were held by over thirteen thousand of his subjects. The goal, of course, was to tax them. Once all the king’s nobles, church officials, and common landowners were surveyed, their information was recorded in Latin on a sheepskin manuscript in two volumes that came to be known as the Domesday Book, or Book of Judgment. Surveyors were given considerable power, and once they recorded someone’s holdings, their assessment was the final word—forever. Many of the places recorded in the Domesday Book still exist in England today, even if their names have changed, and a number of families can track their lineage to individuals cited in it. The book was even used in the 1960s in a court case over ancient land rights.

  Almost a millennium after the Domesday Book was compiled, the British Broadcasting Corporation and a few computer companies got together and decided to make a second installment of the first great census. The goal was to capture all aspects of life in the United Kingdom at the millennial interval. Between 1984 and 1986 over one million people contributed to the project by filling out a survey. Photographs and video footage were collected, and virtual-reality tours of streetscapes were created. Schoolchildren from all over the country wrote entries about where they lived. One child in Orkney, a small group of islands off the coast of Scotland, reported on a hurricane that hit the area in 1952: “Henhouses with dazed or dead hens were blown out to sea. Some hens had all their feathers plucked by the wind. Another crashed through a farmhouse window at a terrific rate, landing in a box-bed. The occupants were astonished.”

  The project was so ambitious for its day that the researchers who initiated it had to invent new technology to contain all the material that had been gathered. Eventually the second Domesday collection was stored on laser discs, an optical storage medium that was a predecessor of CDs and DVDs. To read the discs you needed an Acorn BBC Master computer, supplemented by a few other pieces of machinery. If you wanted to navigate through the material, you also required a Master keyboard and a specialized trackerball.

  Like most other technology from the 1980s, laser discs have been supplanted many times over. So, even though it was thought at the time of its creation that the shiny new laser Domesday Book would outlast its sheepskin antecedent by many thousand of years, the discs barely lasted fifteen. By 2001 no one even knew where to find an Acorn BBC Master computer. The company that made one of the additional pieces, the LV-ROM drive, had only manufactured one thousand of them to begin with, and the laser discs themselves became unstable. In fact, most of the technology needed to access the second Domesday Book, including ye olde trackerball, became so obsolete so quickly that less than twenty years later no one knew if any of it still existed.

  After much angst, part of the second Domesday Book was retrieved and put online in 2004. When a key team member died, the project ground to a halt. In 2011 a different team published some of the 1980s book online, and for six months the BBC invited people to submit twenty-first century updates to the information gathered in the 1980s. Apparently access to much of the original content is still restricted because of copyright issues.

  At around the same time, a similar problem arose in Iceland. As part of an effort to digitize all its censuses, the government had to retrieve the punch cards that had been used to record the data in the 1960s. But they were impossible to read, not because the cards themselves had degraded but because no one in Iceland still had a punch card reader.

  Even when people seriously consider the preservation problem in a project’s design stage, it’s not easy to avert. In the early twenty-first century the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assembled a team to investigate how people of the present might best communicate key information with people of the future. How should we mark radioactive waste so that generations in years to come do not accidentally stumble across it? Initially the team wanted to create a physical record that would last as long as the radioactivity, potentially for tens of thousands of years. But teams from Sweden, Canada, and Japan had already tackled the problem, and the experience of the Japanese team suggested that this approach would not be fruitful: The Japanese had created a silicon carbide tile that measured about twelve square centimeters and looked much like the kind of tile that might be found on a bathroom wall yet was incredibly hard and would not erode, which meant it could be buried in the ground. The team etched the necessary warnings on it with a laser, so the writing would never fade. There was just one problem: If you dropped the tile, it shattered.

  Actually, there were two problems. Archivist Gavan McCarthy, who worked as a consultant on the (IAEA) project, explained: “If well housed, the tiles would last ten thousand years. Which was not bad. But then t
hat just raised the whole question of: In ten thousand years if somebody discovers this, could anybody actually understand what was on it?”

  “What a community needs is continuous knowledge of the existence of the material,” McCarthy said. “If it’s accidentally dug up or just comes to the surface through some volcanic event in the future, that would probably melt the tile anyway.”

  Counterintuitive as it may be, it seems as if the record-making method we invented a few thousand years ago—that is, writing the words of a common language with a handheld marker—is still the most durable. Actually, this technology dates even further back than that: Paper degrades quickly, animal-skin manuscripts last longer, but the world’s oldest records were carved into or painted on rock. One of the oldest records found in many places all over the world is called a cupule, a round indentation carved into rock. No one knows what a cupule actually means, but because they exist we know at least that the people who created them once existed too. The oldest known marks were cross-hatchings made in rock and left in a cave in South Africa seventy thousand years ago. (There is, in fact, one better way of preserving information, but we didn’t invent it—see the epilogue.)

  In the end, the silicon carbide tiles did not go into production. “Without continuous knowledge, then all systems of knowledge are fatally flawed,” McCarthy said. “The reality is that all you can do is hand on as much knowledge as you can to the oncoming generations to give them the best chance you possibly can to do what they can.”

  McCarthy’s rule applies to all culture. Imagine if Shakespeare had composed his work on laser discs. What if the Bible had first been recorded onto eight-track tapes? Preservation isn’t just about the durability of records; it’s about the durability of the people who care about the records. At a certain point after Shakespeare’s plays and the books of the Bible were created, they became so popular that no central body was required to plan their migration from one technology to another—it just happened. Whether for pleasure, out of righteousness, or for profit, generation after generation has engaged with the texts and transferred them from whatever medium they found them in to the one they preferred. From his original draft on parchment, Shakespeare’s plays have over the centuries been rendered in many formats. A copy of his complete works came to me free on the iBooks app of my iPad.