Parish records and Mormons

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I’d like to address the genealogical aspect of this. My sister and I have for years researched our family’s genealogy. Through my job, I was able to attend a conference in Salt Lake City and I actually spent an afternoon at the Mormon’s genealogy library. Didn’t find a single thing that sis and I hadn’t already discovered using our own state archives, state library, local parish (civil) libraries, and that which the Archdiocese of New Orleans has published over the years - they’re not even out of the 1700s yet!

It came as something of a let-down to me. I had hoped to follow the family back to France, Ireland, and England but hit the same roadblocks I hit here. On the other hand, the archives of the Archdiocese were able to give me the sacramental records of my great-great grandfather.

One thing I did discover was that the brother of my great-great-great grandfather was rebaptized. One of his descendants evidently became a Mormon. So the Mormon’s are not the be all and end all of genealogy research.
 
Jerusha said:
If you really want to find out your family history, great great grandparents is quite adequate in finding what intergenerational influences impacted the home you were raised in. Geneaology is not what is important-- that is simply names and dates. What they went through and what they did is the most important aspect of studying your own family history. That generally does not require any major research effort (or seeking help from LDS geneaological libraries).
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Actually if you want to go back enough to see how history and your family are interconnected, which is the point, and your family has kids pretty young, and has been an unusual family a long time, you really need to know what was going on many generations ago, and that’s what I’m working on now. There are contradictory stories. Some just don’t ring true to who we are, others do but it takes more than that. It takes hard data. A legend that sounds right isn’t a full explanation. I want to know about my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, at least, with good reason.
For many African-American and Native American families, it is important to know how they lived before the horrible things that the white man did to them. Legends abound but the old stories are incomplete. If you are the average age of an American (38) and your mother was 25 when you were born, and you can usually figure about 25 years to a generation, and you want to kow what was going on with your family in 1789, that’s nearly a hundred years, or four generations, further back than your GGP’s births.
If you are the descendant of a family that has a story that you were forced out of a town you had helped build during the Tax Riots, you have a lot of work to do to find out why. So there are lots of reaons you would need to know several generations of data. In my family, I grew up with a grandmother telling stories that didn’t line up with each other. Her sisters, whom I knew, grew up listening to their GGM’s stories. So to me, five generations’ removal is only one step away from something I actually grew up with.
 
strngrnrth said:
For many African-American and Native American families, it is important to know how they lived before the horrible things that the white man did to them. Legends abound but the old stories are incomplete.
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For Natives, just going to the tribe, or reading tribal history, can get those details without the specifics other than having traced your ancestry to a specific tribe or sub-tribe. Sometimes you can’t get any further back than that. Perhaps I suggest that as a satisfactory extent because great great grandparents does bring me back to ancestors that were born around 1820, and almost all, any further back, were either tribal or born in Europe.
 
puzzleannie said:
old sacramental records may become available on the same basis as govern archives of personal records in general, 50 years after the death of the last person mentioned, so one with a real need to know (family member, definitely not a Mormon trolling for baptizees) can access the information through diocesan archives (but not the records themselves). in most cases a reasonable administrative fee will be charged for a records church as would be done with any public records archives or other repository as well. But there is no law that obligates the local church to provide that information to anyone other than the individual.
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A cousin of mine was trying to put together a family history and I suggested she go to the family history center at the local Mormon temple. She was hesitant to go there, so I went for her. They had a microfiche of the actual Parish Register from the small rural town in Ireland from which our parents came. I’ve forgotten the exact period covered, but it started around 1840 and ended around the 1920’s – some of the people in there were and are still alive. I spent DAYS in there going through that thing and copying images. It was absolutely fascinating; it detailed our entire extended family history for almost 100 years and I found a lot of interesting data. For example, we have distant cousins here and in Ireland who are “cousins from way-back” and we now know how we are all related.

That parish is still going and I’ve often wondered how they managed to get access to that register and photograph it.
 
So Mormons have the geneology records of non-mormons? Would they even records of French-Canadians?
 
ArdenB said:
So if I wanted to find info on my ancestors they’d probably have it?
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They will have what they have. As other posters have noted, not everything is accurate. Some of what they have is information submitted by people doing genealogy work and their work has varying degrees of accuracy. If you have a 2nd or 3rd cousin (most people don’t even know the names of anyone related more distantly) interested in genealogy, that person may be as good, or better, a source.

Your best source of information about the people from whom you descend are the older members of your family. They may not only be able to give you names and dates, they can tell you stories. They can make your ancestors into real people for you, instead of data on a page.

On that subject, it’s not a bad idea to write those stories down. And your own stories. Write them down for someone who comes after you to read, and get a sense of not only who you are, but about all those who you know about and can tell about.

Mormon records may give you data on a page, and the data may be accurate (or not). But there is nothing there to connect you personally with the lives of your ancestors.

I have records of parts of my family (the ones that have been in the US for generations [Mom’s side] v. the ones for whom I am the first generation born here [Dad’s side]) going back to before the Revolutionary War. Accessing Mormon records did not add to that information in any way whatsoever. But my Grandmother’s cousin added A LOT. (In “genealogy speak” the person that helped me was my 1st Cousin Twice Removed. Someone distantly enough removed that it is unusual that I even found her.)

But you might be more lucky. Or not. What I am trying to say is that what I have learned from the old ones is more meaningful than any of the “data” I have because I got a sense of what the people were like, not just the day they were born and the day they died. Even silly stories, very short anecdotes, bring people to life, at least a little. It’s so much better than “dates” and “names”.

Good luck on your search!
 
ibkc said:
It’s caveat emptor and “you get what you pay for” with them, though. They do absolutely no verification of their information and a lot of their info is flat-out wrong. Check, double-check and quadruple verify any genealogical info downloaded from their site.
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I have double checked. The site I am referring to is Family Search Labs, not Ancestry.com. Family Search Labs is free.
 
ibkc said:
That’s fine, but still, any info you get from the LDS (or any source) needs to be verified. That’s all I was saying.
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absolutely, it is a resource, a tertiary source like an encyclopedia, but not a primary source like a public record of birth or a Church baptismal record, or even a secondary source like a family bible or a newspaper announcement of births.

join your local gen society and get help from people who have been doing this for years and know the pitfalls. Also start with the current generation and work backwards, don’t try to find your family in the 18th c and work forward.

avoid like the plague people who offer to give you a family geneolagy, coat of arms etc for a price.
 
MelanieAnne said:
But you might be more lucky. Or not. What I am trying to say is that what I have learned from the old ones is more meaningful than any of the “data” I have because I got a sense of what the people were like, not just the day they were born and the day they died. Even silly stories, very short anecdotes, bring people to life, at least a little. It’s so much better than “dates” and “names”.

Good luck on your search!
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You are right about cousins. I have several who supplied me with a lot of information. Oral history from the elderly of the family can become very important. It is especially important to capture that soon after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Their childhood memories become so sharp, and inhibitions are lowered, so they might disclose information they would have previously witheld. 😦 😉

And, again, once you get back to the early 19th century, history books, ethnic or geographically based, can give you a general picture of your cultural heritage. I have one line that can be traced back to New Amsterdam, but for my purposes, the writings of Helen Hooven Santmyer were more important than names and dates. :cool:
 
Jerusha said:
You are right about cousins. I have several who supplied me with a lot of information. Oral history from the elderly of the family can become very important. It is especially important to capture that soon after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Their childhood memories become so sharp, and inhibitions are lowered, so they might disclose information they would have previously witheld. 😦 😉

And, again, once you get back to the early 19th century, history books, ethnic or geographically based, can give you a general picture of your cultural heritage. For one line, “The Sauks and the BlackHawk War” by Perry Armstrong, was valuable. Another line can be traced back to New Amsterdam, but for my purposes, the writings of Helen Hooven Santmyer were more important than names and dates. :cool:
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For another line, “The Sauks and the BlackHawk War”, by Perry Armstrong, was valuable even though it is a very obscure work. 😉
 
To me, the passage isn’t the end of the search; it’s the beginning of the real history. I want to know who we were back there, who the parents of the immigrants were, and their parents. That’s what takes the hardest detective work.
 
strngrnrth said:
To me, the passage isn’t the end of the search; it’s the beginning of the real history. I want to know who we were back there, who the parents of the immigrants were, and their parents. That’s what takes the hardest detective work.
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That is a matter of economics. Many of us can’t afford a trip to Europe, and/or the benefit derived would not be worth it.
 
Jerusha said:
That is a matter of economics. Many of us can’t afford a trip to Europe, and/or the benefit derived would not be worth it.
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That’s why I’m trying to find a free genie forum that’s targeted to areas of interest. If I meet people with leads there, we can fax or mail copies to each other of relevant documents.
 
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