Mormons says baptism for the dead is not the aim of storing SA State Records
WILL a “baptism for the dead” in an underground vault make a Mormon of your immortal soul if your records are stored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
AN underground “baptism for the dead” will not make South Australians automatically become Mormons in the afterlife, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says.
The Advertiser revealed yesterday that State Records is using the church to digitise South Australians’ records, that information then being stored in a database in a nuclear attack-proof mountain bunker in the US. The State Government has made it clear that only “open access” records already approved for release will be put in the database. Questions have been raised, however, about giving the church that information.
While access is free, people have to provide an email address and declare whether they are Mormons to register.
And The Vault storage facility in Utah has been in the news for baptising Holocaust Jews and people including Adolf Hitler after their deaths.
In response to The Advertiser’s questions, church spokesman Robert Dudfield said the information was being preserved for “the benefit of future generations” including professional and family historians, and not “for the purpose of Mormon baptisms”.
He said people from the church use the records to identify their ancestors. Mormons believe families should be reunited in the afterlife, and that dead people can reject any baptism performed on them.
“It should also be noted that baptism for the dead does not increase Church membership. The current Church membership of sixteen million is determined by the number of living members only,” he said.
In Parliament yesterday Attorney-General Vickie Chapman tabled a statement saying the partnership with the Church’s genealogy arm, FamilySearch, was signed under the previous Labor government and was a common way to digitise records. She said records were rigorously assessed to ensure they were able to be released.
In response to questions from Greens MLC Mark Parnell, she said adoption records were “completely restricted”, and that social welfare records were generally restricted for 100 years. “To date, only destitute asylum records, pre-1911, and records of infants born at the destitute asylum, also pre-1911, have been digitised and published,” she said.
She said the digitisation was necessary to meet customer demand for better access, including for people in regional SA, interstate and overseas.
The records are already accessible through State Records’ Gepps Cross facility, and a digital copy can be provided for $9.25.