Turning the hearts
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To Church members, inclining the heart of the children to their fathers, as foreseen by the visionary Malachi, is a work of love that transcends the mortal barriers of death and time.
Turning the heart of the children to their fathers, revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith over two decades beginning in 1823, means performing vicarious saving ordinances in the behalf of one's kindred dead, including the essential rite of baptism.
When the concept of baptism for the dead was first announced in 1840, eager members waded into the Mississippi River where they were baptized in the riffling, turbid waters for their kinfolk. From this unstructured start, work for the beloved departed soon began to mature into a twofold effort.
First, such ordinances were to be performed only in temples, which were reared at such great exertion that temple building became a core identifier of Latter-day Saints from within and without.
Second, with the same degree of labor, the Church initiated a quest to help members recreate their family trees. Some 110 years ago, the Church started collecting and preserving names of ancestors into what has become a vast library, indeed, a Mecca for family historians.
These two efforts melded into one as members acted in holy temples on the behalf of deceased kin who lived and worked and fulfilled their life missions when baptism and other blessings were not available.
Progress has not come easily. In building the Salt Lake Temple, for example, three or four yoke of oxen hauled one- to three-ton stones nearly 20 miles through sand, and over gullies, streams and sandpits. Tedious as it was, the building of temples never faltered.
Family history research was equally laborious. In 1840, few but land-owning families with coats of arms bothered to search their ancestry, said David Rencher, director of records and information in the Family and Church History Department. An expert on Irish records who has headed national and local genealogical societies, Brother Rencher explained that coincidentally, family history "didn't become the endeavor of commoners until after the organization of the Church." With the later founding of eastern historic societies, "genealogy began to take on a whole different aspect here because of the way the country was formed with immigrants."
Yet the search for one's roots remained so difficult in the 19th century that the Church's best hope lay in receiving help from outside researchers, for whom President Wilford Woodruff petitioned at the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple: "Bless them, we pray thee, in their labors, that they may not fall into errors in preparing their genealogies; and furthermore, we ask thee to open before them new avenues of information, and place in their hands the records of the past, that their work may not only be correct but complete also."
Avid early researchers sifting the past like detectives collected "stacks and stacks of papers" with forms that had to be re-typed with every new entry. The Church's library used 3 X 5 cards to painstakingly record ordinance work in what was an epic effort.
"It is such a massive data set to deal with, trying to interconnect the family of man," said Brother Rencher.
When the decision was made in 1938 to begin microfilming records, it was revolutionary for record-keeping everywhere. Church cameras soon operated throughout the world, and a safeguarded repository for them was excavated in solid rock, called the Granite Mountain Records Vault, said Wayne J. Metcalfe, director of acquisitions for the department.
Today's results of temple building and family history work are evidence of a century and a half of faith: some 122 temples soon to stand in 37 countries where husbands, wives, and children can be linked for eternity and where the same blessings are given to their ancestors, who are no longer forgotten. And in the Church's Family History Library and its global network of 5,000 local family history centers are 2.4 million rolls of microfilmed records of previous centuries, collected from 105 countries. The advent of computers delivered an exponential booster. Now, many records have been computerized and the Church's Internet site, FamilySearch.org, holds more than 1 billion names, providing online access to all in what has become one of America's premier hobbies.
While many records of many countries have been filmed, the remainder, especially in the Asian countries, is so vast "no one knows how many records there are."
The emphasis now is to collect and provide digital records online "so people don't even have to make the effort to go to the library," he said. Digital records open "a dramatically different world" where eventually records will be captured, indexed and made available in days.
"Introducing children to their ancestors helps broaden their perspectives so their focus isn't on themselves in the greater context of a larger family, in which sacrifices were made so they could enjoy the lifestyle they have today, with the blessings they have," he said.
Helping members start this process, the Church has a small army of missionaries and volunteers around the world, said Don Anderson, director of worldwide support services. He is a former software support manager whose responsibility is to support leaders and the volunteers — family history consultants — who help members find who they are looking for. Technology, Brother Anderson hopes, will let people search digital files with indexes at home in the minutes and hours they can squeeze from their busy days.
"It is safe to say that the rising generation all over the world is more comfortable with technology, but technology isn't at the heart of the work," he said. The heart of the work is the hearts of the children which are to be turned to their fathers. "Spiritual experiences are very common."
Contributing to those spiritual experiences are the many new, smaller temples around the world, said Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Seventy and executive director of the Temple Department, in a recent interview with KSL Newsradio.
"Where those small temples are, there is really a feeling of ownership and participation by the members," said Elder Rasband.
With more temples, ordinances among temple-goers are increasing, said Paul E. Koelliker, managing director of the Temple Department. Expressions of dedication among patrons are plentiful, by example as well as verbally.
In 1999, in Bogota, Colombia, for example, hundreds of people lined up outside the newly dedicated temple to receive their blessings, said Brother Koelliker. The line remained day and night. At 1 a.m., the next morning, he visited the temple's nursery where he found an eager family from Cali, Colombia, being taken into the sanctuary of the House of the Lord and there to be linked together as father, mother and children for eternity, and to their forefathers.
Another bond thus formed: a sense of spiritual knowing between this family and those in 1840 who waded into the Mississippi River where they were baptized for their ancestors in the riffling, tepid waters, and with all those millions of forever families in between.
E-mail to: jhart@desnews.com
