| Reporter
at Large, The Mountain of Names
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Roughly ninety per cent of all the people who ever existed slipped into
complete oblivion, without leaving even their names behind. The loss of
their identities, like the extinction of a species, is irreparable. There
is no "catalogue of catalogues" in which we might hope to find the name
of everybody who has ever lived. Such records as were kept of human populations
in the past have been ravaged by various agents of destruction. For instance,
in the middle of the fourteenth century not only did the Black Death kill
a third of the people in London but fires set to fumigate the victims'
quarters destroyed many of the documents by which they and their ancestors
could have been identified. The earthquake of 1906 destroyed most of the
birth and marriage records in San Francisco. During the bombing of Exeter
in the Second World War, all the wills from southwestern England, which
had been taken there for safekeeping, were destroyed. Professor Hsianglin
Lo, of Canton, who had built up a priceless collection of Chinese clan
genealogies, and had been forced to leave them behind when he fled to Hong
Kong during the Communist takeover, later heard from a friend that his
documents had appeared in a bookstore, which, unable to find another market,
had sold them to grocers for wrapping paper. But loss of records is not
the real problem. Most of the historical human population was never recorded.
It has been estimated by the Genealogical Society of Utah that existing
records of the dead name on the order of only six or seven billion people,
almost all of whom lived after 1500.
The practice of conducting a regular, comprehensive census is a recent development in most of the world, although the Babylonians appear to have been doing it as early as 3800 B.C., and the Romans were inveterate census takers. The periodic assessment of adult male Roman citizens and their property was instituted by the sixth king, Servius Tullius, around 550 B.C. and continued until the Empire fell. In 158 B.C., three hundred and twenty-eight thousand citizens capable of bearing arms were enumerated. At the time of Caesar Augustus, the census was expanded to take in the whole Roman Empire. (One recalls how, in the Gospel of Luke, Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem to be counted among the descendants of David.) Fragments of Chinese censuses in the fourth and fifth centuries of the present era have been found in the Tunhuang caves, in Kansu province; the demographer John Durand has discovered records of or references to hundreds of censuses taken between 2 A.D., when the golden age of the Earlier Han Dynasty was drawing to a close, and 1911, when the last Ching emperor was deposed. The Japanese were keeping track of themselves, with land registers that contained additional household information, by the seventh century, but the practice stopped in the eighth century, when the society became feudal. The inquisition records of the repressive Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867), however, are as nearly comprehensive as most modern censuses; in fact, they represent the earliest instance of the gathering of vital statistics for almost a whole population. The first post-Roman censuses in the West were Scandinavian: Sweden in 1539 (but just the taxable part of the population), Iceland in 1703 (a very thorough one, listing entire households). The first federal census in the United States was taken in 1790, and there has been one every ten years since. But until 1850 only heads of households were listed; the rest of the family appeared as numbers in age and sex columns, and Indians-unless they had been assimilated into white society -were not counted until 1860. Recent American censuses have probably undercounted by between one and three per cent. Russia did not conduct a fullscale census until 1897, and there have been only five censuses since. The 1897 census seems to have been conducted rather like one of the Christmas bird counts by the Audubon Society. It was all done in one day, January 28th (the reasoning was that people were most likely to be at home in the dead of winter), by a hundred and fifty thousand census takers, who filled more than thirty million sheets with data. Even visiting foreigners were counted. The 1897 census was a notable improvement, however, over the "revisions" of taxable "souls" (all males not in the nobility), started by Peter the Great. The first of these began in 1719 and dragged on until 1727. The twenty-three million souls counted in the tenth revision, which was completed in 1859, are estimated to have been only thirty-five per cent of the Czar's subjects. Most of the people in sub-Saharan Africa were not counted until after the Second World War. The first modern census in China was taken in 1953. The first census ever in the Sudan, also taken that year, is of questionable accuracy. Nigeria's 1963 census was apparently a gross overcounting. Some people have never been counted. In 1981, at the request of some anthropologists, I took photographs and wrote down the names, ages, and clans of several dozen BaLese tribespeople who live in small villages in the Ituri Forest of northeastern Zaire, several days from the nearest road. It was the first time their existence had been documented. The age of modern vital-record keeping is widely considered to have begun in 1538, when Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's vicar-general, ordered the parish clergy to record every christening, wedding, and burial (although the Japanese, whose Buddhist necrologies go back to the thirteenth century, and the Italians, whose baptismal records begin in the early fifteenth century, might not agree). Most of the other European countries were also keeping parish registers by the end of the sixteenth century. The usefulness of these records varies from country to country (one scholar recently ranked the German registers as the "most meticulous," the French ones as "a hodgepodge," and the Spanish ones as even more difficult than the French ones to evaluate), but in general parish registers are the meat and potatoes of European genealogists. Because they are restricted to local congregations, however, they are far from comprehensive; by the end of the seventeenth century they covered, at most, only half the European population. The first civil records were begun in France in 1792, and they are between ninety-five and a hundred percent complete. In the United States, most states did not begin to keep birth and death records until after 1900; American genealogists have had to rely on probate and land records, which have been kept since the beginning of Colonial history. The names of people who lived before there were such things as parish or civil records are in short supply. Great Britain, because it has a relatively stable history (no one, after all, has invaded the island since 1066) and a remarkable capacity for accommodating social change, has accumulated the greatest volume and diversity of records from the Middle Ages. It has records of peasant land transactions back through the twelfth century; wills from as early as 1316; family histories of London merchants in the aldermanic class back to 1300; rosters of yeomen in fifteenth-century Leicestershire. But most of its records before 1538 are of the aristocracy. Throughout the world, where names from before 1500 have survived they are almost always of the tiny minority that belonged to a country's hereditary elite. Of the six billion to seven billion names of the dead which various societies are thought to have recorded for various reasons, about a billion and a half have been collected and stored in a climate-controlled, nuclear-bombproof repository twenty-two miles south of Salt Lake City. The rest are still at large, scattered around the world in a multitude of forms. The names in Utah are contained on about a million three hundred thousand rolls of microfilm. Each roll has an average of twelve hundred exposures; each exposure reproduces an average of two pages of written record; and each year, in forty countries, thirty-five to forty million more exposures are taken, by a hundred and fifteen cameras specially designed for filming records. Two of the cameras, for instance, are in Haridwar, India, the site of a popular Hindu shrine, where they are being used to film pilgrim registers kept by a caste of spiritual entrepreneurs called pandas; some families have been coming to Haridwar for centuries, and their records go back more than twenty generations. From time to time, oral pedigrees-such as those from the Tonga Islands, which were taped and transcribed by a local genealogist named Tevita Mapa-are shipped to the Granite Mountain Records Vault, as the repository is called. The vault was built for the Genealogical Society of Utah -another name for the Genealogical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the name that it uses for doing business with various governments and other entities that might be reluctant to deal with the Mormons. No genealogical archive is remotely comparable. The Mormon collection is the closest there is, and the closest there will ever be, to a catalogue of catalogues for the human race. The reason for its existence has to do with the Mormons' religion -with their belief that the family is eternal and all-inclusive, and that each church member, in conformity with the teaching of Joseph Smith, Jr., the prophet and founder of the church, must "seek out" his ancestors and perform certain ceremonies for them, so that he and his entire family can all be united in the Celestial Kingdom. The multimillion-dollar, computerized operation is, in effect, an arm of the church's missionary program. THE first half of the nineteenth
century was a religiously fecund period in the United States, as Fawn M.
Brodie, a former Mormon, has shown in a remarkable biography of Joseph
Smith, titled "No Man Knows My History." Between 1814 and 1830, the Methodist
Church split four ways, and there was even greater schism among the Baptists,
who broke up into Reformed Baptists, Hard-Shell Baptists, Free-Will Baptists,
Seventh-Day Baptists, Footwashers, and other groups. In Vermont, "half
a dozen hills away" from where Smith spent part of his childhood, Isaac
Bullard and his followers practiced free love and communism, regarded washing
as a sin, and wore nothing but bearskin girdles. In New Y or k State, Ann
Lee called herself the reincarnated Christ and founded a sect known as
the Shakers, who whirled dervishlike, spoke in tongues, and were reputed
to indulge in debauchery and to practice infanticide; Jemima Wilkinson
proclaimed herself "the Christ" and "the U niversal Friend," and appointed
as her chief aide the prophet Elijah; William Miller, the founder of the
Adventist Church, predicted that Jesus would revisit the earth and usher
in the millennium in March of 1843, with the result that thousands auctioned
off their property and bought ascension robes; and John Humphrey Noyes,
the head of the Oneida Community, preached that the millennium had already
begun. Faith healers and evangelists went from town to town, "preaching
in great open-air camp meetings where silent, lonely frontiersmen gathered
to sing and shout," Brodie writes. "Revivalists knew their hell intimately-geography,
climate, vital statistics-and painted the sinner's fate so hideously that
shuddering crowds surged forward to the bushel-box altars to be born again."
Some were seized with "the jerks;" others were seized with "the barks"
and went crawling on all fours, vocalizing like dogs. Many frontier families
belonged to no church, and a crusade was mounted by ministers of various
Protestant denominations to convert them. In 1820, the crusade descended
on western New York. Hundreds of people in the little settlements of Palmyra,
Macedon, Manchester, Lyons, and Ontario were persuaded that the end
was at hand, "confessed that the Lord is good," and became "hopeful subjects
of divine grace" at revival meetings, according to an account in a Rochester
newspaper.
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