The Invisible History of the Human Race (15 page)

 • • • 

In 2004 Cyclone Heta, a record-breaking category 5 storm, hit the South Pacific island of Niue, the world’s smallest nation. Heta’s wind gusted at up to 177 miles per hour, and the waves it sent over the island have since been described in a technical report as “extremely very high.” The storm washed seventy homes and businesses over a ninety-foot cliff into the sea, and salt carried by the wind destroyed crops and vegetation. Overall eighty million dollars’ worth of damage was done, and not just to the residential and commercial parts of the island. All of the small nation’s birth, death, and court archives were destroyed. But because the Niue government had stored many of the island’s genealogical records with the LDS in the Granite Mountain Records Vault in 1994, it was able to retrieve copies of them.

The biggest problem with data, once it is collected, is how to preserve it. Because we mere mortals have only the most tenuous mental grasp on the passage of time and our tiny place in it, we tend not to recognize the basic existential truth that, as time passes, stuff gets lost. People forget where they put things. Nations forget where they stored things. Important documents are thrown out. Other important documents are suppressed. Buildings are bombed. They flood or burn down. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the city’s birth, death, and marriage documents. In 1922 the Public Records Office of Ireland was incinerated, and now only a few documents from before that time remain. Sometimes we lose not information itself but the information that would have helped provide a context for the information that we do possess.

Preservation is made even harder by how rapidly technology rolls over. It is often the case that shortly after we invent a new process for recording information, a better one appears, and all the data so carefully stored in the original medium must now be transferred. Consider the fact that as a child, the typical forty-five-year-old used to listen to music on eight-track tapes or vinyl albums. He then recorded his albums onto cassette tapes. Later he tossed out both the albums and the tapes and bought the same music on compact discs. Now CDs are rapidly disappearing, and the same people have begun downloading their music as a digital file. If someone still happened to have an eight-track copy of, say, the Beatles’ White Album, it’s unlikely he would still have the machine to play it on. If he ever wanted to listen to his old recording of “Blackbird” again, he’d have to hunt down an eight-track player or build one himself.

The problem of rapidly evolving technologies or “digital migration” was rather alarmingly illustrated in England in the 1980s with a considerably larger amount of information. Actually, it began in 1086 with the Domesday Book. The first public record ever made in England, the Domesday Book was instigated by William the Conqueror, who wished to take a census of his people and, more specifically, their possessions. He dispatched men to all corners of the realm to record how much land and how many animals were held by over thirteen thousand of his subjects. The goal, of course, was to tax them. Once all the king’s nobles, church officials, and common landowners were surveyed, their information was recorded in Latin on a sheepskin manuscript in two volumes that came to be known as the Domesday Book, or Book of Judgment. Surveyors were given considerable power, and once they recorded someone’s holdings, their assessment was the final word—forever. Many of the places recorded in the Domesday Book still exist in England today, even if their names have changed, and a number of families can track their lineage to individuals cited in it. The book was even used in the 1960s in a court case over ancient land rights.

Almost a millennium after the Domesday Book was compiled, the British Broadcasting Corporation and a few computer companies got together and decided to make a second installment of the first great census. The goal was to capture all aspects of life in the United Kingdom at the millennial interval. Between 1984 and 1986 over one million people contributed to the project by filling out a survey. Photographs and video footage were collected, and virtual-reality tours of streetscapes were created. Schoolchildren from all over the country wrote entries about where they lived. One child in Orkney, a small group of islands off the coast of Scotland, reported on a hurricane that hit the area in 1952: “Henhouses with dazed or dead hens were blown out to sea. Some hens had all their feathers plucked by the wind. Another crashed through a farmhouse window at a terrific rate, landing in a box-bed. The occupants were astonished.”

The project was so ambitious for its day that the researchers who initiated it had to invent new technology to contain all the material that had been gathered. Eventually the second Domesday collection was stored on laser discs, an optical storage medium that was a predecessor of CDs and DVDs. To read the discs you needed an Acorn BBC Master computer, supplemented by a few other pieces of machinery. If you wanted to navigate through the material, you also required a Master keyboard and a specialized trackerball.

Like most other technology from the 1980s, laser discs have been supplanted many times over. So, even though it was thought at the time of its creation that the shiny new laser Domesday Book would outlast its sheepskin antecedent by many thousand of years, the discs barely lasted fifteen. By 2001 no one even knew where to find an Acorn BBC Master computer. The company that made one of the additional pieces, the LV-ROM drive, had only manufactured one thousand of them to begin with, and the laser discs themselves became unstable. In fact, most of the technology needed to access the second Domesday Book, including ye olde trackerball, became so obsolete so quickly that less than twenty years later no one knew if any of it still existed.

After much angst, part of the second Domesday Book was retrieved and put online in 2004. When a key team member died, the project ground to a halt. In 2011 a different team published some of the 1980s book online, and for six months the BBC invited people to submit twenty-first century updates to the information gathered in the 1980s. Apparently access to much of the original content is still restricted because of copyright issues.

At around the same time, a similar problem arose in Iceland. As part of an effort to digitize all its censuses, the government had to retrieve the punch cards that had been used to record the data in the 1960s. But
they were impossible to read, not because the cards themselves had degraded but because no one in Iceland still had a punch card reader.

Even when people seriously consider the preservation problem in a project’s design stage, it’s not easy to avert. In the early twenty-first century the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assembled a team to investigate how people of the present might best communicate key information with people of the future. How should we mark radioactive waste so that generations in years to come do not accidentally stumble across it? Initially the team wanted to create a physical record that would last as long as the radioactivity, potentially for tens of thousands of years. But teams from Sweden, Canada, and Japan had already tackled the problem, and the experience of the Japanese team suggested that this approach would not be fruitful: The Japanese had created a silicon carbide tile that measured about twelve square centimeters and looked much like the kind of tile that might be found on a bathroom wall yet was incredibly hard and would not erode, which meant it could be buried in the ground. The team etched the necessary warnings on it with a laser, so the writing would never fade. There was just one problem: If you dropped the tile, it shattered.

Actually, there were two problems. Archivist Gavan McCarthy, who worked as a consultant on the (IAEA) project, explained: “
If
well housed
, the tiles would last ten thousand years. Which was not bad. But then that just raised the whole question of: In ten thousand years if somebody discovers this, could anybody actually understand what was on it?”

“What a community needs is continuous knowledge of the existence of the material,” McCarthy said. “If it’s accidentally dug up or just comes to the surface through some volcanic event in the future, that would probably melt the tile anyway.”

Counterintuitive as it may be, it seems as if the record-making method we invented a few thousand years ago—that is, writing the words of a common language with a handheld marker—is still the most durable. Actually, this technology dates even further back than that: Paper degrades quickly, animal-skin manuscripts last longer, but the world’s oldest records were carved into or painted on rock. One of the oldest records found in many places all over the world is called a cupule, a round indentation carved into rock. No one knows what a cupule actually
means
, but because they exist we know at least that the people who created them once existed too. The oldest known marks were cross-hatchings made in rock and left in a cave in South Africa seventy thousand years ago. (There is, in fact, one better way of preserving information, but we didn’t invent it—see the epilogue.)

In the end, the silicon carbide tiles did not go into production. “Without continuous knowledge, then all systems of knowledge are fatally flawed,” McCarthy said. “The reality is that all you can do is hand on as much knowledge as you can to the oncoming generations to give them the best chance you possibly can to do what they can.”

McCarthy’s rule applies to all culture. Imagine if Shakespeare had composed his work on laser discs. What if the Bible had first been recorded onto eight-track tapes? Preservation isn’t just about the durability of records; it’s about the durability of the people who care about the records. At a certain point after Shakespeare’s plays and the books of the Bible were created, they became so popular that no central body was required to plan their migration from one technology to another—it just happened. Whether for pleasure, out of righteousness, or for profit, generation after generation has engaged with the texts and transferred them from whatever medium they found them in to the one they preferred. From his original draft on parchment, Shakespeare’s plays have over the centuries been rendered in many formats. A copy of his complete works came to me free on the iBooks app of my iPad.

While the LDS is transferring its data from microfilm to digital storage, it is not making any assumptions that digital will be the final version. “People have been talking about digital preservation for a long time, but no one has actually been building the systems to do it,” Verkler observed. “We think that polyester-based microfilm will last for somewhere between three to five hundred years. For digital, the bytes will rot off the media that you create—within ten to twenty years on DVDs, for instance. All these CDs that people are burning and think that they’re going to last for a long time, they’re not. They’re going to be unreadable.”

 • • • 

What if there were a huge natural disaster, and everything
outside
the Granite Mountain Records Vault were destroyed? Future historians could retrieve the mountain’s records and re-create many hundreds of years of demographic history. Would they also discover that most humans from all of history were, in fact, Mormons?

In the 1990s a Mormon group started working its way through all the names of the victims of the Holocaust, apparently baptizing them into the LDS. The controversy that erupted was resolved by a 1995 agreement between Jewish leaders and the LDS, whereby the church agreed to remove the names of posthumously baptized Jewish people from its records. But in the years that followed many Jewish names found their way back into them.

In 2003 an Armenian group protested that the LDS had baptized by proxy notable members of its community as well. In 2008 the Vatican sent a letter to parishes all over the world asking them to not share their records with Mormon genealogists. In 2012 it was widely reported that Anne Frank had been posthumously baptized into the Mormon Church. Similar stories emerged. Stanley Ann Dunham, the late mother of Barack Obama; Daniel Pearl, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter who was abducted and murdered in Pakistan in 2002; Adolf Hitler; Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter; and Steve Irwin, the Australian TV naturalist, had all been baptized.

I asked Jay Verkler about proxy baptism. It was a misnomer, he explained: Members of the church
offer
baptism to their ancestors. These ancestors are then checked off a list that notes that they have received an offer. That list is different, he said, from the “Members of Record” database, which includes only the names of people who have officially, during life, accepted such an offer.

Nevertheless, Verkler said, Frank had probably been offered what the church calls proxy ordinance about one hundred times. Members are supposed to offer proxy ordinance only to their own ancestors, but the policy has occasionally been abused. “What happens is that a member is reading about Anne Frank and [he] says, ‘Boy, I hope someone has made this offer to her. I think I will.’ And they go and they take care of it. Sometimes people get a little misdirected there.”

Mormons, explained Verkler, have warm associations with the idea of baptism. He understands that many Jews do not. “There were some really awful things that have been done to the Jewish community. Jews were forced to be baptized or burned at the stake, so ‘baptism’ is not a happy word. We didn’t understand that for a while, I think, culturally.” (As one Jewish genealogist confirmed to me, “The whole idea of proxy baptism is incredibly offensive for Jewish people.”)

“On the other hand,” Verkler said, “if you think about other religions that light a candle and say a prayer for someone, or create a prayer for someone who is deceased, it’s not a unique pattern, so that same kind of motivation is what I think motivates people.”

The same motivation may be involved, but as many Jews have pointed out, when they light a candle, they don’t make a record of it. The practice remains a point of tension between the two faiths, especially as there is a large Jewish genealogical community that relies on the resources created by the LDS.