How our personal records ended up in a Mormon mountain vault in Utah
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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.
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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.smh.com.au/national/how-our-personal-records-ended-up-in-a-mormon-mountain-vault-in-utah-20250304-p5lgur.html.
