This project is impressive in its comprehensiveness, and I'm glad an organization has undertaken it. Still, the discriminatory, homophobic dogmas of the LDS church cannot be ignored, and criticism of these beliefs should not be discouraged. Only through discourse can they be challenged and obsoleted. The sooner that happens, the better.

* patio11 is, afaik, a practicing Catholic.

* patio11 contributes a great deal to this site.

* He probably has a thick skin about it, but comments like that are probably not something he likes or will encourage him to use a site.

My conclusion is that anything that takes us that far off topic should be flagged because it may have a negative impact on the value I get from the site. I came here to talk about startups and hacking, not religion or politics.

I'd be happy to talk politics all you want if you drop by Padova and we go out for a drink. Not here though!

I don't see how that follows.

- An atheist.

"Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format. The LDS drove microfilm technology in the twentieth century, and today it is a leader in digital data storage. Its digital camera operators photograph records and get those images online within two days, and then an enormous army—that is to say, hundreds of thousands—of volunteers index the files and make them searchable. The Mormons were crowdsourcing long before the word was invented."

I wouldn't criticise the Catholic healthcare system, it has helped too many people for that.

The idea that doing good makes you immune to criticism for doing bad is particularly pernicious. Certainly, good that an institution has done and continues to do (especially insofar as it seems to indicate a generally positive intent) might shape the form and tone of any criticism of a bad thing it does, it shouldn't prevent such criticism altogether.

I don't know of about all possibilities, but the following are examples I know of personally.

1.) One of my friends has a daughter. He came from a very conservative family, married, had a child, then finally had a conversation with his wife explaining his situation. He's gay, in a relationship and has contributed to the world's family tree.

2.) Lesbian couple. Both wanted kids, so a friend of theirs (straight) contributed sperm. So, one of the partners has definitely contributed to the world's family tree.

There's nothing morally wrong or right about this statement, it's just a mathematical property of a very particular social graph.

There are definitely uses for a genetic only tree, eg for medicine.

And while people recognize adoption, they often care more about their blood relatives. Hence, the proliferation of Y-chromosome and mtDNA genetic genealogy.

(And this distinction is completely orthogonal to the question of whether same-sex couples get the right to be legally recognized as a couple or parents.)

I imagine that over time, any purported complete genealogy will make those distinctions but come to include information about both.

While both people in a same sex couple cannot claim parentage on the same child, one parent can. With multiple children each partner could claim parentage on one child, but not the other. This is not different than a 2nd marriage where each hetero partner can claim parentage on only 1 child.

In fact, in many instances you would not model "birth of couple X" but "person A and person B were married between years ...", "person C has father B and mother D".

Exactly because re-marriages and adultery, and children born out of wedlock has always been common (and known), so even if dealing with same sex couples is a reasonably new thing, dealing with children where linking their parentage to a specific couple is nothing new.

Of course, the practice of lying about family history is equally old, so in practice most genealogy becomes unreliable very quickly. In my own family tree, we have a child who in official registers is listed as having a mother we have lots of further data on, and the father is listed as a "Friedrich Denneche, travelling hat-maker from Bremen".

Problem is at the time (early 1800's I think), everyone had to register with local police when entering Oslo, and there is no record of any travelling hat-maker from Bremen. Nor did my dad find any records in Germany (though it's possible that there would be guild-records he did not find, he never got a chance to spend much time looking at German records) that matched.

His theory, which of course can't be proven, was that the real dad was the mothers brother-in-law. Especially as he took her in and later adopted the child and she lived with him and his wife (talk about awkward situation if my dads theory is true...). But at the time this happened, sexual relations between in-laws was legally considered incest in Norway, and it was a crime not to list the father on the birth certificate, and a crime to lie on it, so if the theory is true she was in a bind: she had to put down a father, but could not put down the real father without even worse problems, and could not put down someone who might find out and object. Inventing a person nobody would expect to be able to find would have been a safe way out.

Yes there is. Many countries have gender recognition laws which trans people to legally recognised as their true gender. A person can be genetically decended from two women.

Family trees also work sideways. If someone's brother marries a man, then that other man is the uncle to that person's children.

For them, recording a same-sex couple - disregarding that they don't agree with it - serves no purpose.

So their project certainly is no replacement for a secular genealogical database, but it is still a fantastic source of data (my very-much atheist dad made extensive use of their services - he was able to get microfilm copies of Norwegian church books sent from Utah to the Mormon church in Oslo with much less effort than getting hold of copies of the records in Norway - in most cases the alternative would be to travel around the country to visit the specific churches and go through the actual paper copies)

It wouldn't at all surprise me that this eventually changes. If you look at the history, you will notice that their beliefs have changed in several significant ways over their history.

As a side note, since my ancestors came to America in the 1850s, there has been at least one person in each generation that is very interested in family history. The effort got a boost when my uncle became Mormon shortly after he started his family. (An event not without controversy in the family.) The resources available for genealogy research as a result of this work are quite staggering.

Also makes me wonder how an adopted person constructs a family tree.