Why the Mormon Church Loves Your DNA

and technology and the unexpected places it's taking us. I'm your host Michelle fay Cortes. This week we look more deeply into the study of family origins. It's an area where one religious denomination in particular has really had an impact. Here's Bloomberg Health reporter christ and b Brown with the story that you can Don's welcome the President and less International Steve ron Wood. You look grave. We are not

going to have such a last this week. First, I want to give a little warm welcome to all of you who are enjoyed to share for the very first time. If you've ever doubted the market potential of consumer DNA testing, then you probably haven't been to roots tech. You might have thought then you were just coming to a Family History Congress will in eight days of places. But if you worried, you're about to find and more importantly, you're

about to feel so much more than that. Roots Tech is like the consumer Electronics Show for family history hobbyists. It is the world's biggest genealogy conference, and I'm not kidding when I say big. This year, more than twenty thou people from every state and thirty eight countries blocked

to Salt Lake City for the four day conference. To get a sense of how many people that is, consider that the conference fills downtown Salt Lake City Salt Palace, a seven hundred thousand square foot convention center that served as the media center when Utah last hosted the Winter Olympics. The multitudes make the pilgrimage to Utah every year for one reason, to find out about the latest and greatest

genealogical technologies. At roots Tech, companies like ancestry, dot Com and twenty three and me show up to show off their latest products, and people waiting hours long lines for discounts. Celebrity genealogists give talks and teach classes, and there are people from genealogical ideas just roaming around and costumes their ancestors might have worn, like riches and pilgrim hats. My favorite thing there was this feature in the roots Take app that showed you how many cousins you had at

conference and let you message them. There were these big digital displays everywhere with stats on how many cousins had connected. On the second day, I noticed one display that said more than seven thousand cousins had contacted each other through the app. I just love the idea that all these people were going to this conference and grabbing a cup of coffee with a family member they've never met. It's

like family tree building in real time. I write about DNA testing a lot and all of the sort of surprising consequences that have come out of a growing consumer interest in it. Filling out the family tree used to be a hobby relegated to grandparents and great aunts. Now it seems like everyone is mailing away their DNA to find out about their roots. Seeing so many people gathered in one place to talk about genealogy really stallized for

me just how popular this hobby has become. On Opening night, there was this live acapella show that thousands of people attended. Some people stood up in the aisles and danced. The place was a zoo. But maybe the craziest thing about roots Tech is that it is actually put on by the Mormon Church, or more precisely, the conference is put on by Family Search, a genealogy organization run by the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. As the church prefers to be called at the opening ceremony after that acapella group saying Family Search as CEO Steve Rockwood introduced several high ranking members of the church. Please welcome to the stage, the German of the Board of Family Seas International, a member of the Core of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lattery Saints, and my dear Brad

Elder by Foster. At one point he told the crowd, we believe the Heavenly Father wants to connect us all together. This is a theme you here repeated frequently at roots Tech. We are all related. We're all one big family. To be clear, roots tech is not a religious conference, though atheist should beware that there are some pretty clear religious overtones. Roots Tech is a genealogy conference that is put on by the Mormon Church. Around half of the people who

attend are not Mormon. If you missed the moment where they invoked God and called church elders out on stage, you might have never known there was a religious connection at all. But there's a good reason that the church puts on the biggest genealogy conference in the world. Genealogy is a longstanding Mormon interest. More than that, it's become intertwined with Mormon beliefs. Mormons believe that family spend eternity

together in the celestial Kingdom or Heaven. They also believe in the baptism of the dead, a controversial practice in which those who did not find their faith on earth or given a chance of salvation and a chance at eternity with the rest of their family. This is where genealogy comes in. If you're going to save the soul of your ancestor, you need to know who they are.

So in the nineteenth century, the church began sending Mormons back to Europe to scour family records, and in the century since, the Church is actively thought to bolster the science and industry of genealogy, including by more recently putting

on roots deck. A century before consumer market even existed, the Mormon Church had a need for better ways of doing genealogy, and in pushing genealogical techniques and technologies forward, it has set the stage for this crazy moment we're living in right now, a time when you can buy a DNA hit for and find out how Scottish you are, or discover your dad isn't your dad, or even help the police touch a serial killer. It was this convergence of science, industry and religion that had brought me to

roots Tick. Honestly, I just found it fascinating. At the conference, I sat down with Steve Rockwood, the CEO of Family Search that I mentioned earlier. He explained to me how genealogy has become such a big part of the Mormon faith. While it is universal, it is it is innate desire to know where you come from. Different people enter this and actually start putting resource towards it for different reasons.

And in the Church of Jesus Christ celebrity saints, there's actually a doctrinal reason why members of the church wanted to learn their their family history, and it's a simple that's a simple principle that we believe that families can live together forever and that that's a multi generational experience. So that you can live with your your loved ones that you knew um while you lived here on earth, in your immediate family, but you can also live with

your grandparents and your great grandparents. And we just believe families are forever. Many early Mormons were pioneers escaping discrimination back east to eventually settle in the Great Salt Lake Valley.

This is how genealogy entered the picture. The early members of the church back in the eighteen hundreds, their homelands were in the eastern United States, they were in the UK, there in northern and western Europe, and as they were converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they gathered together in different parts of the Eastern United States, the Midwest,

and ultimately out here to the Inner Mountain West. And so to hear, you have these pioneers that went through all of this to come here, and they had left their homelands, they had left their families. But there's this doctrine that families can be together. And if you perform certain ceremonies and rites in the in the temple of the Church of Jesus Christ larities saints, then you can

give that offering to your ancestors well. In order for them to do that, they need to have the records, and the records were back home, the records were thousands of miles away. In order to fulfill a key part of their faith, Mormon pioneers needed to access family records that they didn't have. So in the church founded the Genealogical Society of Utah, sending Mormons as far afield as Europe to track down original documents that would allow people

to fill out their family trees. And it started as a service, and then the technology came and so it went from service to let's use this technology, and that's when we started sending out camera crews to go start taking the pictures and all the archives. So it's a that's that's the root of it, and it's evolved now for over a hundred years. Like Steve mentioned, at some point the church started to get really interested in new technologies that could help it do a better job of

collecting family records and ultimately connecting families in heaven. In the nineteen thirties, the church began using microfilm, photographing original documents so that they would be better preserved and more accessible. In the nineteen eighties, as home computers became a thing, the church introduced software so that people could create and

share their family trees electronically. With the advent of the Internet, the church realized that the genealogical Society of Utah could have a far wider reach and re christened it Family Search. The family Search website eventually launched in nineteen, three years after Ancestry dot com. Ancestry dot com, by the way, also has Mormon roots. It was started by two Brigham young grads who got their start selling Latter day Saints

publications on floppy disk. The church even created jed com, which is the file format still used today for genealogical

data today. The church record collection includes billions of digitized online records, along with more than two point four million rolls of microfilmed records, seven hundred forty two thousand microfiche, and hundreds of thousands of books and periodicals, all stored and the Family History Library on Temple Square in Salt Lake City and in the Granite Mountain Records Fault, which is basically a climate controlled bunker for records built under

seven hundred feet of rock to withstand a nuclear blast. Here's Steve again. Our role is simply to connect members of the Church of Jesus Christ, Hilary Saints, and those who aren't members of the church, to just simply connect them to their homelands and connect them back to their families. Exporting the enthusiasm for genealogy. The Church's betting is good for everyone. It means better technology, more access to records, and an easier path to salvation. The Church, Rockwood told me,

wants to be a catalyst for the entire industry. That's actually why it started roots Tech back in two thousand eleven. Genealogists and technologists weren't talking to each other, and the Church wanted to change that. We don't compete with absolutely anyone here at roots Teck. We don't compete with anyone in the industry. We want to see what they bring

to the party. We want to see if what we can add to it, and then find ways that baby, there's a more synergistic approach, and we've been very, very successful in doing above and beyond all else. We just want to be the trusted partner and the trusted, honest, neutral entity here and that's why we created roots Tech. We were the one organization um that could actually bring everyone together. Root stick exists to cement the church's role

at the center of the genealogy industry. I talked with Donald Atkinson, a historian at Queen's University in Canada, for some perspective on the contributions the Church has made to the field. Almost a decade ago, Donald wrote a book about the Mormon Church and genealogy. He told me he doesn't think the Church gets enough credit for the role

it has played in field. This is something I've heard before from people in the industry that the church really set the stage for the industry that would follow it. The church was going to it helped the first big wave of democratization of genealogy. If you if we talked in the year eighteen fifty, let's say, you know, before the church did this, but eighteen fifty, genealogy was something

rich people did. If you're talking nineteen fifties, starts to become possible, using often by Mormon sources to start too, for everybody if they'll take the time to start to learn about their family, and then it gets just easier and easier, and it's snowballs. Um. So, yeah, the democratization of genealogy is in large degree caused by made possible by the at Roots Tech, the biggest draws classes where people learn things like how to sturge scandinating archives or

read an ancestor sloppy, hard to decipher handwriting. Increasingly, people are really interested in DNA testing, which in the past decade has gotten really easy and cheap. For a lot of people, DNA testing is like the gateway drug to genealogy. They send in a tube of spit to find out about their heritage just for fun, and all of a sudden they were messaging with third cousins and obsessively trying

to fill in the gaps on their family tree. All of the major DNA testing companies have multiple classes at roots Tech, as well as huge booths where they're doing demonstrations and selling kids. I talked to a lot of people about why they were there. Some of them got the genealogy bug from a grandparent or had a friend or family member that was into it. Here's one woman I met, Jan My husband is big into genealogy, and so I'm just I'm I'm starting and loving it and

I'm loving to find my family. Okay, so you're being a supportive spouse, a supportive spouse, but now I love it taking on a life of itself. It is. It's just fun to know where we came from. And also, um, we have grandchildren, and the stories that we're finding from our history, I really think strengthens our grandchildren as we tell them, Gosh, look what your great great grandparents live through, you can live through today. It seems like more than ever, we just want to know who we are and where

we came from. Within the Mormon faith, enthusiasm for roots is baked into the culture. Within most Mormon congregations. There's a person whose duty it is to help people with their own family history. Bringham Young. The university owned by the church, even produces a popular Greatest Race style reality TV show in which participants forego technology on a hunt to find and meat relatives get ready for a race

unlike any other. Our family round we rolled. For the first time in my life, I met a little piece of my dad. I've gained a better appreciation for family. I talked for a long time with Sydney Orton, an eighteen year old by Youth student who has been into genealogy since she was a little kid. She talked a lot about what genealogy means to her as a more man, but also about just how fun it is. I started when I was eleven years old. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,

and I was part of that religion. Our church leaders really pushed us to be involved in genealogy, and one aspect that they were particularly focusing on in two thousand eleven was um indexing, and I thought, Okay, I'll try it, so I did, and I fell in love with it. She told me what really got her hooked on genealogy were the stories she uncovered. There were stories behind the records.

Were like weird things I'd find in records, like kids who died because they were born two heads, or this whole family where they named They had nine kids and they named every single kid after a character from the Bible or not a character of sent from the Bible. And then their last kid they named Lucifer, which I just really wanted to know the story behind. Sydney started out helping the church index other people's records, but eventually

she also got curious about her own family. Some of her ancestors were Mormon pioneers, people who traversed North America with hand pulled carts to get to Utah. But this particular family, as I learned their story, I was just so blown away by their strength or their determination and loyalty to God into each other. One of her distant great grandmothers, Jane James, lost a baby on the boat to America from England and her husband on the truck

to Utah. Her son got frostbite and couldn't walk. Sidney says, Jane and her daughter survived on four ounces of flower a day pulling their carts to Utah and the snow. In other words, this relative was pretty tough. So they had so much unwavering faith in God. It's yeah. So it's really touched me. And I thought, well, if they have that much strength and I came from them and other ancestors like them, than I have a lot of

strays because they're my family. At Roots Tech, I met lots of Mormons who were proud of the role the faith has played in popularizing an interest in family history. Paul Nada, a spokesperson for Family Search, told me that he thought the church has played a big role in influencing a lot of areas of the technology, like online family trees. The scrap booking craze of the eighties and nineties,

he said, even began in Mormon circles. Many credit the beginnings of that movement to one Utah Mormon Family Church. Tenants in modern science, of course, aren't always in sank far from it. While the Mormon Church has embraced DNA testing, the technologies helped confirm scientific findings, also at odds with the core Mormon belief The Book of Mormon holds that Native Americans descended from Jews fleeing the conquest of ancient Israel by the Assyrians nearly three thousand years ago, but

population genetics support earlier work by archaeologists and anthropologists. The show humans first walk to North America about fourteen thousand years ago over a land bridge linking present day Siberia with Alaska. That hasn't stopped the church from forging ahead with new technologies that it hopes can make genealogy more interesting and accessible. For the first time. This year, Family

Search will hold a second Roots Tech conference in London. Steve, the Family Search CEO, told me that Family Searches are in d arm Is exploring how it might use artificial intelligence to help with archiving and searching records. It's also thinking about how it could help bolster the burgeoning field of consumer DNA testing. He said. Long term planning for the church isn't a decade or two that's short term.

They're planning for what the world might be like in hundreds of years, for the probability that future genealogists will suffer from having too much data instead of too little. There's this incredible emotion, even a spirit of the work, that you feel when you've find out um how you're connected, either in general to your homeland or in general to

your family. It's a feeling of of completeness, of connectiveness belonging in Utah, I visited the Family History Library, the place where so many of the church's records were kept. The prominence of the library, right on Temple Square, directly across from the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple, says a lot about the importance of genealogy to Mormons. It is a five story temple to genealogical research, but

unlike Mormon temples, the libraries open to anyone. When I went inside, I'm not really sure what I was looking for. A young and very enthusiastic church missionary sat me down at a computer and showed me the ropes. We decided to see if we could find any records related to my great grandfather Manuel, who swam to Texas from Mexico. Since Manuel was not a legal immigrant, I was surprised

that we actually found some things. Like Sydney, I found the most fascinating things were the stories behind the records. From census record I learned that he had worked eighty hours a week as a waiter, and that he and my great grandmother had a lodger. I imagined his long days at the restaurant, coming home to his wife and

my young grandfather. I wondered who that lodger was. There was also another record, one that just might have been him, record of a man who at least shared his name and age, crossing into America at about the right time. It was powerful the young missionaries zerox the record for me.

Helping people connect to their past, he told me, was really really cool for me, though, there was something slightly uncomfortable about finding pieces of my very Catholic great grandfather's history enshrined in a building belonging to religion to which neither of us belonged. Then again, if the Church hadn't preserved so many of these records, who's to say they

would still exist at all. For me, the records may not be a path to heaven, but at least they are path to knowing a little bit more about my past. That's it for this week's prognosis. Do you have a story about healthcare in the US or around the world We want to hear from you. Find me on Twitter at bay Cortes or email me m Portes at Bloomberg dot net. If you were a fan of this episode, please take a minute to rate and review us. It really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was

produced by Liz Smith. Our story editors were Drew Armstrong and Rick Shine. Francesca Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll be back in two weeks on May night with a new episode. See you then, m HM, and that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about healthcare in the US or around the world we want to hear from you. Find me on Twitter at fa Cortes or send me an email

m cortes at Bloomberg dot net. If you are a fan of this episode, please take a moment to rate and review us. It really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Liz Smith. Our story editors were Drew Armstrong and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi as head of Podcasts. We'll be back on May ninth with our next episode. See you then. Francesca Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.