The pain and outrage of slavery are not things all blacks want to relive, Stokes said. Trust Co. Its release was announced Monday at news conferences in Salt Lake City and 11 other cities across the country. In Chicago about 65 people of various religious and racial backgrounds gathered in the Newberry Library, where church officials discussed the CD and demonstrated how to use it. The information, from original records preserved in the National Archives, was culled and collected by more than 550 inmates at the Utah State Prison, South Point Correctional Facility, working as volunteers, church officials said. The church, which stresses genealogy as a means of identifying and blessing the dead, has established a Family History Center at the prison.
Inmates donate their time to genealogy projects.
But the church, long perceived as a homogeneous white bastion that once withheld the priesthood from black men, might seem like an unlikely resource for black genealogists. But as a black woman and a child of the South, I can say there is no more loving place. The bank-records project was launched in 1989 by Marie Taylor, an employee of the church's Family Church History Department who stumbled on microfilm of the old bank's records. The records contain sometimes intensely personal information that reflects the pain and hope, triumph and heartbreak of America's freed slaves and other blacks in the years after the Civil War. Some list everything from the names of plantation owners to the skin complexion of the applicant.