Mormon Archives and Genealogy - Touring the Philadelphia LDS Temple

The Philadelphia Mormon Temple
Photo courtesy of {Phillymag.com}

This week I had the pleasure of touring the new Philadelphia LDS Temple on Vine street with a few of my classmates. There are only 152 LDS Temples in the world. The temple was absolutely beautiful! The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, is famous for their record keeping and genealogy work. Who knew? During our tour, the guides told us about their practice of baptizing deceased ancestors in order to keep families bound together in the afterlife. This ceremony requires extensive research by family members to find not only the names of their relatives, but also land records, vital records, wills, town records, and church records. In order to do this work, ancestry.com was developed by LDS members in 1996. Prior to 1996, the information initially offered on the site was sold as floppy discs containing LDS publications and records. All of this is news to me!

I found a PBS article which explains a little more about the archive work being done by LDS members all over the country. According to PBS, “original records -- about 2.4 million rolls of microfilm containing 2 billion names that have been traced -- are locked away behind 14-ton doors in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a climate-controlled repository designed to survive a nuclear impact that is built into the Wasatch mountain range, about 20 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.” It’s interesting that the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world was created by Mormons (and for Mormons) to aide them in the research required for a religious ceremony. To learn more about the Philadelphia LDS Temple, click HERE. To learn more about Mormon archives, click HERE.