November 1, 1995, Sunset, Soul-Searching in Utah, by Peter Fish,

November 1, 1995, Sunset, Soul-Searching in Utah, by Peter Fish,

"The Good Lord commanded Adam to keep a genealogy." A dozen of us are listening to the 9 A.M. orientation at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints's Family History Library. In a neighborhood - Salt Lake City's Temple Square - devoted to the monumental, the library more than holds its own. Its sharp-creased granite facade gives it the sober formality of a custom-made suit. A little formality is not inappropriate. After all, the Family History Library houses more records about more people's ancestors than any other place on earth. "We believe all the peoples of the world are brothers and sisters," says our guide. 

"For many people, genealogy is a fascinating hobby," says library spokesman Tom Daniels after the orientation. "For us it is a religious obligation." 

Soon after he founded the church in 1830, Joseph Smith had a revelation: that Mormon ordinances, or sacraments, should be offered to Mormon ancestors so they could have the opportunity to accept or reject the faith. Every year the church performs more than 5 million proxy baptisms, marriages, and endowments (the last being a kind of formal embracing of church tenets). To participate, Mormons must know precisely who their ancestors are. 

To this end, the Family History Library has collected on microfilm the birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, wills, and probate records of more than 2 billion of the world's dead. The place has a studious hum to it. Microfilm machines whir. People squint at books with titles like Tombstone Inscription of Monroe County, New York and The Seven Cemeteries of the Porterville, California, Cemetery District. Others stand at computer terminals, using genealogical software designed for the library. About 870,000 people a year come here to stand and squint, with tens of thousands more visiting satellite libraries around the world. Roughly 60 percent of the people who use the Family History Library are church members. The rest are non-Mormons tracing their own family histories, or historians, sociologists, or genetic researchers stepping through this door to the past. 

"When I was a little girl I wanted to be a detective," says Charlotte Parker. "Well, that's what I am." Parker is one of the library's genealogical consultants, who stand ready to assist the confused. She has traced her ancestry to first-century Britain, being lucky enough to encounter a line of minor nobility (for commoners, written records generally go back no further than around 1500). Volunteer Pat Smith is another detective, specializing in Native American records. Using Jesuit mission records and a Lakota Sioux census and historical account called the Winter Count, she has traced one branch of her ancestry to a part-Sioux trapper named Pierre Dorion, mentioned by historian Francis Parkman, Jr., in his classic 1849 work, The Oregon Trail. 

As the Lakota Winter Count proves, the church casts its nets wide. Brent Griffiths, head of the record acquisition office, explains that at first Mormon genealogists concentrated on the eastern United States and northern Europe, homelands of most early church members. But as the church's geographic reach and membership has expanded, so has its search for ancestors. Today Griffiths supervises 200 people working in 55 different countries, from Hungary to Sri Lanka. Most of the job involves photographing records on microfilm. Copying the contents of a large facility can take years, but his workers use other means when necessary - for example, tape-recording oral genealogies in Indonesia. Occasionally, mistrustful authorities balk at letting the Mormons in. Occasionally, too, the church missteps. Earlier this year, it admitted to performing posthumous baptisms on victims of Nazi concentration camps. After protests by Jewish groups, the practice was halted. 

With such gaffes rare, the library is usually granted per mission to copy records. "We're perceived as stable, as ready to help," Griffiths says. The library gives each local archive a copy of the microfilm it makes, and keeps another. All of it - including some 2 million rolls of micro-film, with 5,000 rolls added monthly - is stored in a granite vault high in the Wasatch Range east of town. 

I have not come to the library to research my own family history. But something about the image of the world's ancestors preserved in a mountain cave makes me want to give it a try. I stand at a computer terminal. I type in my surname. 

I am immediately lost. There are hundreds of Fishes, thousands of Fishes, Fishes from Kansas, Fishes from New York. Nathaniel Fish, born Lynn, Massachusetts, 1637. Thomas Fish, born Market Harborough, Great Bowden, England, 1681. The much-laughed-about 18th-century New England clergyman, Preserved Fish. Back through the centuries they go, to Germany, to Holland, to who knows where. 

"Sometimes people put their hand on the screen and touch it," says Pat Smith, "and they have tears in their eyes just like they're touching the person. It's a very emotional place to me." It is, yes, a strangely emotional place, and a strangely dizzying one. Generations roll backwards. We touch the screen and our ancestors, a first-century Briton, a Lakota Sioux, touch each other in an infinity of human connectedness. 

Family History Library, at 35 N. West Temple St., is open 7:30 to 6 Mondays, until 10 P.M. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission is free. For more information, call (801) 240-2331.