Jill Churchill - From Here to Paternity

"Oh, yes."

"Poor old thing. I know better than most how annoying she can be. She's a snoop and a nuisance, and I wish Pete would quit encouraging her and she'd leave poor Uncle Bill alone. But for all that, I think she's going to really regret this debate. Stu Gortner will destroy her," Tenny added.

"Why? Is she that wrong? Or is he — God forbid! — even nastier than she is?"

"No, no. He's not nasty at all. That's why he'll win. He's as smooth as silk. A very accomplished speaker. The kind you go away believing without even knowing what he said. He's even talked me into deleting charges from his bill, and that's not easy. Poor old Doris will just get red in the face, pop her heart pills, and get nastier and more outrageous until she's alienated everybody in the room."

"Surely the Society doesn't promote this debate," Jane said.

"Oh, no. Lucky says Mrs. Schmidtheiser set it all up without even consulting with him. I thought she was speaking for the group when she reserved the room, and by the time I found out different and talked to Lucky, it was too late. She'd had all her flyers printed up and everything. I think Lucky believes it may teach her a lesson to let her go ahead with this."

"I'm not sure people like that are capable of being taught lessons," Jane remarked.

Tenny turned her attention to a guest who had approached the front desk with a handful of maps and a desperately confused expression.

Jane and Shelley went back to the restaurant.

The table Jane had staked out and then abandoned had been taken, but they found the last free table in the far back corner of the room. As they wound their way toward it, they saw Doris Schmidtheiser at HawkHunter's table.

His other companions had either already left or been driven away by her. She was rattling along, gesturing wildly, riffling through her file folders. HawkHunter, his charisma briefly on hold, was looking frantic. Jane smiled. Nobody was immune from Doris Schmidtheiser's attentions.

They sat down and Jane quickly flipped open the luncheon menu. "I've discovered that this resort is missing only one thing," she said.

Shelley was surprised. "I can't imagine what that is."

Jane grinned over the top of the menu. "Bathroom scales. Shall we order?"

Chapter 6

After they'd ordered, Shelley got out her small notebook. "Jane, that was a fascinating morning. You won't believe what I've learned. You know I've been meaning to get busy for a year or so on a family history. My mother keeps nagging me to organize all those notes and pictures and old newspaper clippings and obituaries from my grandfather's attic. But I had no idea how to go about it. Now I think I've got a fix on it. It all comes down to the Mormons."

"Mormons? Your family was Mormon?"

"Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to be more accurate. No, my family wasn't Mormon, but it's the Mormons who have all the information."

"How so?"

"Well, I'm not sure I've got this exactly right, but it seems that according to their beliefs, family ties are forever. When you go to heaven, you'll be reunited with your entire family. All your ancestors. But to prepare for that, you have to know who they all were. So one of the important aspects of belonging to the church is to do your own family genealogy. Knowing your ancestors is part of the religion, you see. Then, when you've got them all sorted out, you submit them somehow to the main church in Salt Lake City for something called 'sealing', and then they'll be waiting for you in the afterlife."

"Okay, but what has that got to do with your family?"

"It's like this — since this is a church belief, the church collects records to make it possible to do this genealogical searching. Unimaginable numbers and kinds of records from all over the world. Census records and family histories and court records from every county in the country, and church records from every church that will allow its records to be photographed."

"Oh, not just Mormon churches?"

"No, all kinds of churches. Some of the records go back hundreds and hundreds of years, and they're all microfilmed."

"I still don't see—"

"Even though they collect this material for then-own people, they make it available for free to anybody who wants to use it."

"You're kidding!"

"Not a bit. There are hundreds of Mormon churches around the country with what are called" — she paused, checking her notes— "Family History Libraries. I got a list of them and there's one right in our neighborhood, in fact. The actual films aren't there, but the indexes are. You can go in — for free, mind you — and look through the indexes to all these documents and learn what film numbers they're on; then you order the film from where they're all kept in Salt Lake City. You just pay a couple of dollars for the postage and handling, and a few weeks later, your film arrives and you can read it right there on special microfilm-reading machines at the local church library."

"This is amazing. Who'd have thought?" Jane said.

"Oh, there's more. They've sort of 'distilled' a lot of the basic information down into a couple of gigantic computer programs called… let's see…" She thumbed through a few pages. "The Ancestral File and the International Genealogical Index. And you can use their computer to get into all this material as well. The example they gave in the class was that if you know your grandfather's name was James Johnson and he was born in 1899, somewhere in the United States, you can plug all that in and the computer will turn out a list of every James Johnson born in 1899 in the United States. Well, not every one, but all the ones they've got in their records so far. Then you can sort through and learn more about each of them to see if one of them is yours. And if one is, you can sometimes find out what film number has original documents about him and maybe who else is researching the same family. That way you could get in touch with some third or fourth cousin you didn't even know about and compare notes on the whole family."

The waiter arrived with their orders: a tuna salad sandwich for Shelley that gave new meaning to the concept of tuna, and a chicken Caesar salad for Jane that was large enough to feed a family of four. They ate for a few minutes in blissful silence. Jane finally took the edge off her hunger well enough to pause and say, "So if you need to look up something — a will, for instance — in some little county in Oregon or some place, you don't have to actually go there and search for it. You can just order a film of the records?"

"That's how I understand it," Shelley said. "The instructor kept emphasizing that not all records for any given place have been filmed, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been. If you live near Salt Lake City, you can just go into the main library and search without waiting for the film to be delivered. So if you needed something in a hurry, or if you didn't know enough about court jurisdictions to know exactly where to look, you could hire a genealogist there to look it up for you."

"This really is astonishing," Jane said, applying herself to her salad again. "This main library must be a stupendous size. And think of the organization required to keep it operating smoothly. So what else did you learn about?"

"Mainly not to take spelling seriously. Like Lucky was saying this morning, spelling has been pretty haphazard until quite recently. My own guess would be that it didn't get to be awfully important in this country until Social Security. Did you know that most states didn't even have such things as birth certificates until this century? And some didn't require them until the 1930s or so."

"Well, I suppose there were still a lot of people outside cities having babies at home until then. Look over there, Shelley."