How our personal records ended up in a Mormon mountain vault in Utah
The Sydney Morning Herald/March 6, 2025
By Claire Aird, Greg Muller and Claudianna Blanco
Personal records of hundreds of thousands of Australians are being copied and sent to a secretive mountain vault in Utah owned by the Mormon Church following an agreement with the National Archives of Australia (NAA).
Government records with details including birth dates, school yearbooks, marriages and migration are being digitised by FamilySearch International, a not-for-profit owned and run by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
In return, the NAA is allowing the LDS enterprise to copy the records as part of the in-kind agreement. They’ll be added to the LDS’s already vast collection of 16.5 billion worldwide records stored in the Granite Mountain Records Vault, 180 metres deep inside a mountain on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah.
The vault was custom-built to withstand earthquakes and nuclear attacks, to preserve records in a natural, temperature-controlled environment.
The new revelation, which has sparked privacy concerns, emerged in the new LiSTNR podcast documentary series Secrets We Keep: Should I Spit?
“The records that FamilySearch were interested in digitising were the records that really put a person in a place at a particular time,” NAA director-general Simon Froude, who led the deal, told the podcast.
Froude confirmed the Australian records copied by FamilySearch International end up in the Granite Mountains Record Vault.
“I guess the pay-off for [FamilySearch International] is that they receive a copy of the material,” he added.
Included in the deal are personal dossiers of displaced people who migrated to Australia after World War II, Australian births and baptisms until 1981, Australian marriages up to 1980 and South Australian school admission registers up to 1994.
FamilySearch International has previously entered into partnerships with government agencies in Victoria, NSW, Tasmania and South Australia.
The NAA has also signed similar agreements with Ancestry International DNA LLC, the biggest DNA and family history company in the world, and which was originally founded by LDS entrepreneurs in Utah.
The records vault is 180 metres deep inside Granite Mountain on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.
These “digitisation” agreements enable Ancestry.com and FamilySearch to work onsite at National Archives at no cost, allowing them to digitise copies of these records to later make them available, free, on the National Archives’ online catalogue RecordSearch, and also via the Ancestry.com and FamilySearch platforms.
While these types of deals are attractive to governments as a means of saving money, they give the LDS Church and Ancestry unmatched ability to identify people and their family connections which benefits them commercially.
Why is the Mormon Church interested in Australian records?
Since the LDS church founded the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1894, Mormon missionaries have travelled across the United States and the world, collecting official and unofficial records, including historical census information, birth, death and marriage certificates, photographs and other historical documents.
Church members use these records to build family trees going back generations, to perform a ritual known as “baptism of the dead” – a religious practice in which ancestors are baptised into the faith posthumously, so families live together in eternity. These ordinances apply even to family members born before the LDS church was established in 1830. To baptise the dead, you first have to find them.
Data and DNA combined
When DNA science was developing late last century, the Mormon church was quick to see its potential to identify past relatives. In 1999, prominent Mormon entrepreneurs and scientists tried to build “the family tree of the world”. They processed the DNA from tens of thousands of Mormon volunteers worldwide in a pioneering project to establish relationships through DNA and genealogy.
When a DNA database is combined with centuries of genealogy research, an extremely powerful tool for identification emerges. A DNA profile is no longer an anonymous series of letters; it can now have a name attached.
While DNA is unique to every person, it is also shared. DNA can identify familial connections going back centuries, and by using historical records, genealogists can build family trees going forward in time.
This nine-part podcast investigation delves into the DNA industry including the revelation that private records of many Australians are contained in a mountain vault in Utah controlled by the Mormon Church because of a deal with the National Arc...
Eleven Therapeutics chief and a former Columbia University professor, Yaniv Elrich told the Should I Spit? podcast that DNA can never be anonymous.
“I don’t need you in my database in order to identify you. Since we’re all connected through deep genealogical ties, it’s enough to have a small database of 1 or 2 per cent of the population to identify everyone else,” Elrich said.
Elrich found that each person who does a DNA test to find out their family history is like a “beacon”, illuminating people who are not in the database.
“Think about it as a light switch that suddenly flicks,” he said. “You have this beacon that illuminates hundreds of people around him or her, and then you keep collecting these random beacons in the population, and suddenly you just have enough light that there are no more shadows. Nobody is in the dark, everyone is being illuminated and you can just watch them.”
So when you do a DNA test, you’re doing one for your family too.
To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.
