re: Question about ancestry.com

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Twenty miles outside Salt Lake City, a massive man-made bunker known as The Vault stretches nearly 700 feet into a mountain of granite. Sealed behind colossal doors designed to survive a nuclear attack, the climate-controlled cavern is home to the world’s largest collection of genealogical records—3.5 billion at last count. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been collecting these records since the late 1800s so its members may identify and posthumously baptize ancestors who might then join them in the afterlife. The public isn’t allowed inside The Vault. But many of its holdings, which include everything from US census records to Jamaican marriage certificates, are available for free on the church’s FamilySearch website, which has information on more than 4 billion people
Before they can be used to track down long-gone relatives, the church’s records first must be indexed so they’re searchable. Even with thousands of volunteers entering information from scanned documents, the church can’t process the data fast enough. “People come and they go,” says Mike Judson, who’s in charge of recruiting data entry volunteers. “They do a little bit here, a little bit there.” So the church has tapped into a more consistent source of labor: prisoners.

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Ancestry.com was started by Mormons. Its purpose is twofold: to make money for the church and to entice people to share genealogical records that church members can use to proxy-baptize the dead.

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