Speaker 1: There's long been a complicated relationship between science and religion,
Speaker 1: but science owes a lot to religion. Despite the inherent tensions, Christianity, Islam,
Speaker 1: and Judaism, just to name the three main Western religions,
Speaker 1: have all made contributions to science at various times through history,
Speaker 1: advancing the fields of algebra, chemistry, astronomy, genetics, and more.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis, Bloomberg's podcast about the intersection of health
Speaker 1: and technology and the unexpected places it's taking us. I'm
Speaker 1: your host Michelle fay Cortes. This week we look more
Speaker 1: deeply into the study of family origins. It's an area
Speaker 1: where one religious denomination in particular has really had an impact.
Speaker 1: Here's Bloomberg Health reporter christ and b Brown with the
Speaker 1: story that you can Don's welcome the President and less
Speaker 1: International Steve ron Wood. You look grave. We are not
Speaker 1: going to have such a last this week. First, I
Speaker 1: want to give a little warm welcome to all of
Speaker 1: you who are enjoyed to share for the very first time.
Speaker 1: If you've ever doubted the market potential of consumer DNA testing,
Speaker 1: then you probably haven't been to roots tech. You might
Speaker 1: have thought then you were just coming to a Family
Speaker 1: History Congress will in eight days of places. But if
Speaker 1: you worried, you're about to find and more importantly, you're
Speaker 1: about to feel so much more than that. Roots Tech
Speaker 1: is like the consumer Electronics Show for family history hobbyists.
Speaker 1: It is the world's biggest genealogy conference, and I'm not
Speaker 1: kidding when I say big. This year, more than twenty
Speaker 1: thou people from every state and thirty eight countries blocked
Speaker 1: to Salt Lake City for the four day conference. To
Speaker 1: get a sense of how many people that is, consider
Speaker 1: that the conference fills downtown Salt Lake City Salt Palace,
Speaker 1: a seven hundred thousand square foot convention center that served
Speaker 1: as the media center when Utah last hosted the Winter Olympics.
Speaker 1: The multitudes make the pilgrimage to Utah every year for
Speaker 1: one reason, to find out about the latest and greatest
Speaker 1: genealogical technologies. At roots Tech, companies like ancestry, dot Com
Speaker 1: and twenty three and me show up to show off
Speaker 1: their latest products, and people waiting hours long lines for discounts.
Speaker 1: Celebrity genealogists give talks and teach classes, and there are
Speaker 1: people from genealogical ideas just roaming around and costumes their
Speaker 1: ancestors might have worn, like riches and pilgrim hats. My
Speaker 1: favorite thing there was this feature in the roots Take
Speaker 1: app that showed you how many cousins you had at
Speaker 1: conference and let you message them. There were these big
Speaker 1: digital displays everywhere with stats on how many cousins had connected.
Speaker 1: On the second day, I noticed one display that said
Speaker 1: more than seven thousand cousins had contacted each other through
Speaker 1: the app. I just love the idea that all these
Speaker 1: people were going to this conference and grabbing a cup
Speaker 1: of coffee with a family member they've never met. It's
Speaker 1: like family tree building in real time. I write about
Speaker 1: DNA testing a lot and all of the sort of
Speaker 1: surprising consequences that have come out of a growing consumer
Speaker 1: interest in it. Filling out the family tree used to
Speaker 1: be a hobby relegated to grandparents and great aunts. Now
Speaker 1: it seems like everyone is mailing away their DNA to
Speaker 1: find out about their roots. Seeing so many people gathered
Speaker 1: in one place to talk about genealogy really stallized for
Speaker 1: me just how popular this hobby has become. On Opening night,
Speaker 1: there was this live acapella show that thousands of people attended.
Speaker 1: Some people stood up in the aisles and danced. The
Speaker 1: place was a zoo. But maybe the craziest thing about
Speaker 1: roots Tech is that it is actually put on by
Speaker 1: the Mormon Church, or more precisely, the conference is put
Speaker 1: on by Family Search, a genealogy organization run by the
Speaker 1: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. As the
Speaker 1: church prefers to be called at the opening ceremony after
Speaker 1: that acapella group saying Family Search as CEO Steve Rockwood
Speaker 1: introduced several high ranking members of the church. Please welcome
Speaker 1: to the stage, the German of the Board of Family
Speaker 1: Seas International, a member of the Core of the Church
Speaker 1: of Jesus Christ of Lattery Saints, and my dear Brad
Speaker 1: Elder by Foster. At one point he told the crowd,
Speaker 1: we believe the Heavenly Father wants to connect us all together.
Speaker 1: This is a theme you here repeated frequently at roots Tech.
Speaker 1: We are all related. We're all one big family. To
Speaker 1: be clear, roots tech is not a religious conference, though
Speaker 1: atheist should beware that there are some pretty clear religious overtones.
Speaker 1: Roots Tech is a genealogy conference that is put on
Speaker 1: by the Mormon Church. Around half of the people who
Speaker 1: attend are not Mormon. If you missed the moment where
Speaker 1: they invoked God and called church elders out on stage,
Speaker 1: you might have never known there was a religious connection
Speaker 1: at all. But there's a good reason that the church
Speaker 1: puts on the biggest genealogy conference in the world. Genealogy
Speaker 1: is a longstanding Mormon interest. More than that, it's become
Speaker 1: intertwined with Mormon beliefs. Mormons believe that family spend eternity
Speaker 1: together in the celestial Kingdom or Heaven. They also believe
Speaker 1: in the baptism of the dead, a controversial practice in
Speaker 1: which those who did not find their faith on earth
Speaker 1: or given a chance of salvation and a chance at
Speaker 1: eternity with the rest of their family. This is where
Speaker 1: genealogy comes in. If you're going to save the soul
Speaker 1: of your ancestor, you need to know who they are.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteenth century, the church began sending Mormons
Speaker 1: back to Europe to scour family records, and in the
Speaker 1: century since, the Church is actively thought to bolster the
Speaker 1: science and industry of genealogy, including by more recently putting
Speaker 1: on roots deck. A century before consumer market even existed,
Speaker 1: the Mormon Church had a need for better ways of
Speaker 1: doing genealogy, and in pushing genealogical techniques and technologies forward,
Speaker 1: it has set the stage for this crazy moment we're
Speaker 1: living in right now, a time when you can buy
Speaker 1: a DNA hit for and find out how Scottish you are,
Speaker 1: or discover your dad isn't your dad, or even help
Speaker 1: the police touch a serial killer. It was this convergence
Speaker 1: of science, industry and religion that had brought me to
Speaker 1: roots Tick. Honestly, I just found it fascinating. At the conference,
Speaker 1: I sat down with Steve Rockwood, the CEO of Family
Speaker 1: Search that I mentioned earlier. He explained to me how
Speaker 1: genealogy has become such a big part of the Mormon faith.
Speaker 1: While it is universal, it is it is innate desire
Speaker 1: to know where you come from. Different people enter this
Speaker 1: and actually start putting resource towards it for different reasons.
Speaker 1: And in the Church of Jesus Christ celebrity saints, there's
Speaker 1: actually a doctrinal reason why members of the church wanted
Speaker 1: to learn their their family history, and it's a simple
Speaker 1: that's a simple principle that we believe that families can
Speaker 1: live together forever and that that's a multi generational experience.
Speaker 1: So that you can live with your your loved ones
Speaker 1: that you knew um while you lived here on earth,
Speaker 1: in your immediate family, but you can also live with
Speaker 1: your grandparents and your great grandparents. And we just believe
Speaker 1: families are forever. Many early Mormons were pioneers escaping discrimination
Speaker 1: back east to eventually settle in the Great Salt Lake Valley.
Speaker 1: This is how genealogy entered the picture. The early members
Speaker 1: of the church back in the eighteen hundreds, their homelands
Speaker 1: were in the eastern United States, they were in the UK,
Speaker 1: there in northern and western Europe, and as they were
Speaker 1: converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they gathered together
Speaker 1: in different parts of the Eastern United States, the Midwest,
Speaker 1: and ultimately out here to the Inner Mountain West. And
Speaker 1: so to hear, you have these pioneers that went through
Speaker 1: all of this to come here, and they had left
Speaker 1: their homelands, they had left their families. But there's this
Speaker 1: doctrine that families can be together. And if you perform
Speaker 1: certain ceremonies and rites in the in the temple of
Speaker 1: the Church of Jesus Christ larities saints, then you can
Speaker 1: give that offering to your ancestors well. In order for
Speaker 1: them to do that, they need to have the records,
Speaker 1: and the records were back home, the records were thousands
Speaker 1: of miles away. In order to fulfill a key part
Speaker 1: of their faith, Mormon pioneers needed to access family records
Speaker 1: that they didn't have. So in the church founded the
Speaker 1: Genealogical Society of Utah, sending Mormons as far afield as
Speaker 1: Europe to track down original documents that would allow people
Speaker 1: to fill out their family trees. And it started as
Speaker 1: a service, and then the technology came and so it
Speaker 1: went from service to let's use this technology, and that's
Speaker 1: when we started sending out camera crews to go start
Speaker 1: taking the pictures and all the archives. So it's a
Speaker 1: that's that's the root of it, and it's evolved now
Speaker 1: for over a hundred years. Like Steve mentioned, at some
Speaker 1: point the church started to get really interested in new
Speaker 1: technologies that could help it do a better job of
Speaker 1: collecting family records and ultimately connecting families in heaven. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, the church began using microfilm, photographing original
Speaker 1: documents so that they would be better preserved and more accessible.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, as home computers became a thing,
Speaker 1: the church introduced software so that people could create and
Speaker 1: share their family trees electronically. With the advent of the Internet,
Speaker 1: the church realized that the genealogical Society of Utah could
Speaker 1: have a far wider reach and re christened it Family Search.
Speaker 1: The family Search website eventually launched in nineteen, three years
Speaker 1: after Ancestry dot com. Ancestry dot com, by the way,
Speaker 1: also has Mormon roots. It was started by two Brigham
Speaker 1: young grads who got their start selling Latter day Saints
Speaker 1: publications on floppy disk. The church even created jed com,
Speaker 1: which is the file format still used today for genealogical
Speaker 1: data today. The church record collection includes billions of digitized
Speaker 1: online records, along with more than two point four million
Speaker 1: rolls of microfilmed records, seven hundred forty two thousand microfiche,
Speaker 1: and hundreds of thousands of books and periodicals, all stored
Speaker 1: and the Family History Library on Temple Square in Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City and in the Granite Mountain Records Fault, which
Speaker 1: is basically a climate controlled bunker for records built under
Speaker 1: seven hundred feet of rock to withstand a nuclear blast.
Speaker 1: Here's Steve again. Our role is simply to connect members
Speaker 1: of the Church of Jesus Christ, Hilary Saints, and those
Speaker 1: who aren't members of the church, to just simply connect
Speaker 1: them to their homelands and connect them back to their families.
Speaker 1: Exporting the enthusiasm for genealogy. The Church's betting is good
Speaker 1: for everyone. It means better technology, more access to records,
Speaker 1: and an easier path to salvation. The Church, Rockwood told me,
Speaker 1: wants to be a catalyst for the entire industry. That's
Speaker 1: actually why it started roots Tech back in two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: Genealogists and technologists weren't talking to each other, and the
Speaker 1: Church wanted to change that. We don't compete with absolutely
Speaker 1: anyone here at roots Teck. We don't compete with anyone
Speaker 1: in the industry. We want to see what they bring
Speaker 1: to the party. We want to see if what we
Speaker 1: can add to it, and then find ways that baby,
Speaker 1: there's a more synergistic approach, and we've been very, very
Speaker 1: successful in doing above and beyond all else. We just
Speaker 1: want to be the trusted partner and the trusted, honest,
Speaker 1: neutral entity here and that's why we created roots Tech.
Speaker 1: We were the one organization um that could actually bring
Speaker 1: everyone together. Root stick exists to cement the church's role
Speaker 1: at the center of the genealogy industry. I talked with
Speaker 1: Donald Atkinson, a historian at Queen's University in Canada, for
Speaker 1: some perspective on the contributions the Church has made to
Speaker 1: the field. Almost a decade ago, Donald wrote a book
Speaker 1: about the Mormon Church and genealogy. He told me he
Speaker 1: doesn't think the Church gets enough credit for the role
Speaker 1: it has played in field. This is something I've heard
Speaker 1: before from people in the industry that the church really
Speaker 1: set the stage for the industry that would follow it.
Speaker 1: The church was going to it helped the first big
Speaker 1: wave of democratization of genealogy. If you if we talked
Speaker 1: in the year eighteen fifty, let's say, you know, before
Speaker 1: the church did this, but eighteen fifty, genealogy was something
Speaker 1: rich people did. If you're talking nineteen fifties, starts to
Speaker 1: become possible, using often by Mormon sources to start too,
Speaker 1: for everybody if they'll take the time to start to
Speaker 1: learn about their family, and then it gets just easier
Speaker 1: and easier, and it's snowballs. Um. So, yeah, the democratization
Speaker 1: of genealogy is in large degree caused by made possible
Speaker 1: by the at Roots Tech, the biggest draws classes where
Speaker 1: people learn things like how to sturge scandinating archives or
Speaker 1: read an ancestor sloppy, hard to decipher handwriting. Increasingly, people
Speaker 1: are really interested in DNA testing, which in the past
Speaker 1: decade has gotten really easy and cheap. For a lot
Speaker 1: of people, DNA testing is like the gateway drug to genealogy.
Speaker 1: They send in a tube of spit to find out
Speaker 1: about their heritage just for fun, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden they were messaging with third cousins and obsessively trying
Speaker 1: to fill in the gaps on their family tree. All
Speaker 1: of the major DNA testing companies have multiple classes at
Speaker 1: roots Tech, as well as huge booths where they're doing
Speaker 1: demonstrations and selling kids. I talked to a lot of
Speaker 1: people about why they were there. Some of them got
Speaker 1: the genealogy bug from a grandparent or had a friend
Speaker 1: or family member that was into it. Here's one woman
Speaker 1: I met, Jan My husband is big into genealogy, and
Speaker 1: so I'm just I'm I'm starting and loving it and
Speaker 1: I'm loving to find my family. Okay, so you're being
Speaker 1: a supportive spouse, a supportive spouse, but now I love
Speaker 1: it taking on a life of itself. It is. It's
Speaker 1: just fun to know where we came from. And also, um,
Speaker 1: we have grandchildren, and the stories that we're finding from
Speaker 1: our history, I really think strengthens our grandchildren as we
Speaker 1: tell them, Gosh, look what your great great grandparents live through,
Speaker 1: you can live through today. It seems like more than ever,
Speaker 1: we just want to know who we are and where
Speaker 1: we came from. Within the Mormon faith, enthusiasm for roots
Speaker 1: is baked into the culture. Within most Mormon congregations. There's
Speaker 1: a person whose duty it is to help people with
Speaker 1: their own family history. Bringham Young. The university owned by
Speaker 1: the church, even produces a popular Greatest Race style reality
Speaker 1: TV show in which participants forego technology on a hunt
Speaker 1: to find and meat relatives get ready for a race
Speaker 1: unlike any other. Our family round we rolled. For the
Speaker 1: first time in my life, I met a little piece
Speaker 1: of my dad. I've gained a better appreciation for family.
Speaker 1: I talked for a long time with Sydney Orton, an
Speaker 1: eighteen year old by Youth student who has been into
Speaker 1: genealogy since she was a little kid. She talked a
Speaker 1: lot about what genealogy means to her as a more man,
Speaker 1: but also about just how fun it is. I started
Speaker 1: when I was eleven years old. I am a member
Speaker 1: of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints,
Speaker 1: and I was part of that religion. Our church leaders
Speaker 1: really pushed us to be involved in genealogy, and one
Speaker 1: aspect that they were particularly focusing on in two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven was um indexing, and I thought, Okay, I'll try it,
Speaker 1: so I did, and I fell in love with it.
Speaker 1: She told me what really got her hooked on genealogy
Speaker 1: were the stories she uncovered. There were stories behind the records.
Speaker 1: Were like weird things I'd find in records, like kids
Speaker 1: who died because they were born two heads, or this
Speaker 1: whole family where they named They had nine kids and
Speaker 1: they named every single kid after a character from the
Speaker 1: Bible or not a character of sent from the Bible.
Speaker 1: And then their last kid they named Lucifer, which I
Speaker 1: just really wanted to know the story behind. Sydney started
Speaker 1: out helping the church index other people's records, but eventually
Speaker 1: she also got curious about her own family. Some of
Speaker 1: her ancestors were Mormon pioneers, people who traversed North America
Speaker 1: with hand pulled carts to get to Utah. But this
Speaker 1: particular family, as I learned their story, I was just
Speaker 1: so blown away by their strength or their determination and
Speaker 1: loyalty to God into each other. One of her distant
Speaker 1: great grandmothers, Jane James, lost a baby on the boat
Speaker 1: to America from England and her husband on the truck
Speaker 1: to Utah. Her son got frostbite and couldn't walk. Sidney says,
Speaker 1: Jane and her daughter survived on four ounces of flower
Speaker 1: a day pulling their carts to Utah and the snow.
Speaker 1: In other words, this relative was pretty tough. So they
Speaker 1: had so much unwavering faith in God. It's yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's really touched me. And I thought, well, if they
Speaker 1: have that much strength and I came from them and
Speaker 1: other ancestors like them, than I have a lot of
Speaker 1: strays because they're my family. At Roots Tech, I met
Speaker 1: lots of Mormons who were proud of the role the
Speaker 1: faith has played in popularizing an interest in family history.
Speaker 1: Paul Nada, a spokesperson for Family Search, told me that
Speaker 1: he thought the church has played a big role in
Speaker 1: influencing a lot of areas of the technology, like online
Speaker 1: family trees. The scrap booking craze of the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: he said, even began in Mormon circles. Many credit the
Speaker 1: beginnings of that movement to one Utah Mormon Family Church.
Speaker 1: Tenants in modern science, of course, aren't always in sank
Speaker 1: far from it. While the Mormon Church has embraced DNA testing,
Speaker 1: the technologies helped confirm scientific findings, also at odds with
Speaker 1: the core Mormon belief The Book of Mormon holds that
Speaker 1: Native Americans descended from Jews fleeing the conquest of ancient
Speaker 1: Israel by the Assyrians nearly three thousand years ago, but
Speaker 1: population genetics support earlier work by archaeologists and anthropologists. The
Speaker 1: show humans first walk to North America about fourteen thousand
Speaker 1: years ago over a land bridge linking present day Siberia
Speaker 1: with Alaska. That hasn't stopped the church from forging ahead
Speaker 1: with new technologies that it hopes can make genealogy more
Speaker 1: interesting and accessible. For the first time. This year, Family
Speaker 1: Search will hold a second Roots Tech conference in London. Steve,
Speaker 1: the Family Search CEO, told me that Family Searches are
Speaker 1: in d arm Is exploring how it might use artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence to help with archiving and searching records. It's also
Speaker 1: thinking about how it could help bolster the burgeoning field
Speaker 1: of consumer DNA testing. He said. Long term planning for
Speaker 1: the church isn't a decade or two that's short term.
Speaker 1: They're planning for what the world might be like in
Speaker 1: hundreds of years, for the probability that future genealogists will
Speaker 1: suffer from having too much data instead of too little.
Speaker 1: There's this incredible emotion, even a spirit of the work,
Speaker 1: that you feel when you've find out um how you're connected,
Speaker 1: either in general to your homeland or in general to
Speaker 1: your family. It's a feeling of of completeness, of connectiveness
Speaker 1: belonging in Utah, I visited the Family History Library, the
Speaker 1: place where so many of the church's records were kept.
Speaker 1: The prominence of the library, right on Temple Square, directly
Speaker 1: across from the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple,
Speaker 1: says a lot about the importance of genealogy to Mormons.
Speaker 1: It is a five story temple to genealogical research, but
Speaker 1: unlike Mormon temples, the libraries open to anyone. When I
Speaker 1: went inside, I'm not really sure what I was looking for.
Speaker 1: A young and very enthusiastic church missionary sat me down
Speaker 1: at a computer and showed me the ropes. We decided
Speaker 1: to see if we could find any records related to
Speaker 1: my great grandfather Manuel, who swam to Texas from Mexico.
Speaker 1: Since Manuel was not a legal immigrant, I was surprised
Speaker 1: that we actually found some things. Like Sydney, I found
Speaker 1: the most fascinating things were the stories behind the records.
Speaker 1: From census record I learned that he had worked eighty
Speaker 1: hours a week as a waiter, and that he and
Speaker 1: my great grandmother had a lodger. I imagined his long
Speaker 1: days at the restaurant, coming home to his wife and
Speaker 1: my young grandfather. I wondered who that lodger was. There
Speaker 1: was also another record, one that just might have been him,
Speaker 1: record of a man who at least shared his name
Speaker 1: and age, crossing into America at about the right time.
Speaker 1: It was powerful the young missionaries zerox the record for me.
Speaker 1: Helping people connect to their past, he told me, was
Speaker 1: really really cool for me, though, there was something slightly
Speaker 1: uncomfortable about finding pieces of my very Catholic great grandfather's
Speaker 1: history enshrined in a building belonging to religion to which
Speaker 1: neither of us belonged. Then again, if the Church hadn't
Speaker 1: preserved so many of these records, who's to say they
Speaker 1: would still exist at all. For me, the records may
Speaker 1: not be a path to heaven, but at least they
Speaker 1: are path to knowing a little bit more about my past.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's prognosis. Do you have a
Speaker 1: story about healthcare in the US or around the world
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. Find me on Twitter
Speaker 1: at bay Cortes or email me m Portes at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot net. If you were a fan of this episode,
Speaker 1: please take a minute to rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Liz Smith. Our story editors were Drew Armstrong
Speaker 1: and Rick Shine. Francesca Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in two weeks on May night with
Speaker 1: a new episode. See you then, m HM, and that's
Speaker 1: it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do you
Speaker 1: have a story about healthcare in the US or around
Speaker 1: the world we want to hear from you. Find me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at fa Cortes or send me an email
Speaker 1: m cortes at Bloomberg dot net. If you are a
Speaker 1: fan of this episode, please take a moment to rate
Speaker 1: and review us. It really helps new listeners find the show.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Liz Smith. Our story editors
Speaker 1: were Drew Armstrong and Rick Shine. Francesca Levi as head
Speaker 1: of Podcasts. We'll be back on May ninth with our
Speaker 1: next episode. See you then. Francesca Levie is head of
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Podcasts.