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Comment by thrownaway2424 | Hacker News Reader

That's not even close to the most offensive thing ancestry.com does to you.

What else do they do?

Nothing, to my knoweldge. I've had a subscription to Ancestry.com for almost two years and have found it amazingly useful. I've learned far more about my ancestors than is known from oral family history. The subscription is pricey, but their service is amazing.

That said, I suspect Ancestry.com is much less useful for those living outside the United States. In particular, having ancestors who lived in the country at least 72 years prior to the most recent US Census is what makes Ancestry.com most compelling. That's when census records on individual people become available, as outlined at https://www.census.gov/history/www/genealogy/decennial_censu.... Ancestry.com has done high-resolution scans of all US Census records and parsed them with decently accurate OCR, so you can plug in a (likely deceased) ancestor's name and get their street address, age, occupation, rent/mortgage, those living in the household with them, etc.

I have also not tried their AncestryDNA product, and probably will not. If I were to try direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, I'd probably use 23andme.

The mormons use ancestry.com data to proxy-baptize your ancestors into their ridiculous death cult.

I was going to reply with, "I don't care what mumbo-jumbo people say with my name embedded", but that actually is pretty offensive to someone with strong religious beliefs.

Right, Martin Luther is probably a Mormon now ;)

To me, it's just funny. But maybe not to Lutherans?

You have to be a descendant of the deceased to submit their name to be done. Also, there's a lot of sensitivity toward religions who have general qualms about the practice (for example, it's against the rules to submit Jewish holocaust victims). Also, many religious leaders of other faiths have gone on record[1] saying how they're glad the Mormons have brought back the biblical practice of baptisms for the dead.

The practice isn't as cultist as some (gp) may want to imply without understanding what it implies and really means.

[1] https://youtu.be/4mMDYt0Twpo

>The practice isn't as cultist as some (gp) may want to imply without understanding what it implies and really means.

You are having some group of people you don't know say something about a dead relative followed by a ritual not based in any science to change which imaginary place they will be in.

Well yes, but that's not really a criticism specific to Mormon rituals; it applies to most religious rituals.

Mormons use genealogy data to proxy-baptize their own ancestors. Like many Christians, they have a rather literal interpretation of the New Testament: if you don't get baptized, you won't be "saved." Like many Christian denominations, they also believe that not any old baptism will do. You have to be baptized by someone with the proper authority and in the proper way (by immersion). Unlike most Christians, they believe that if you died without getting baptized properly, you're not damned. You just have to wait until one of your ancestors baptizes you by proxy. They believe that before the "end of the world" every human being who has ever been born will receive one of these proxy baptisms. That way, nobody goes to hell on a technicality.

It's an interesting loophole to get around a completely sick and twisted part of Christian theology: that many innocents are damned just because they didn't accept Christ and baptism in their lifetimes.

Now, I personally think Christianity is hogwash, and I don't believe in Mormonism. But to be worried that some well-meaning Mormon descendent is going to retroactively make you Mormon after your death is pretty silly. If you don't believe in Mormonism then the proxy baptism is meaningless.

I wonder how they account for people who died unbaptized and childless. I'm baking a descendant now, but what happens if a comet strikes New York tomorrow?

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