Why do churches, governments, keep records for 1,000's of years?

Think. How could they? It’s only the Mormons who do that. And their genealogy have to be a bunch of bunk. Why do the Mormons do it? It must fit in with their religious beliefs somehow.

Cuz nobody throws them out.

To appease their alien overlords.

Hoarders.

To answer your other weird questions.

Also, many church Christians seem to often be atrocious busy-bodies.

For the churches, it began as the ONLY way they had to record history & it grew from there. It wasn’t so easy to reproduce the information. When I was a little girl, the family bible was the way families kept their family tree before birth certificates were thought of, The family bible was passed down from generation to generation & the keeper of the bible took the job very serious being sure to keep it updated. When my Grams & Gramps passed, it was a huge fight over which child was getting the family bible. Now days nobody keeps a family bible but use a genealogy service to assist in the record keeping.

It was a similar situation for the government…it was the simplest way to record history & there is NO part of history that wasn’t considered important so nothing is ever removed!!!

To help history be accurate. Documents are more reliable that the generational sharing of past experiences.

Legitimacy.

Churches exist only because they give the impression of trustworthiness. Religion is belief-based – there is nothing concrete or tangible to what they are selling (preaching).

So the only way then can try and show their seriousness and value is through a long history. It may be completely made-up, but it’s a long history of bullshit, which lends some legitimacy to that church.

For blackmail purposes.

When I worked in a local government archive, the Archivist told me that the Mormons came in from time to time and requested census lists and then they’d baptize the list, so that everyone on that list was then considered by their church to be a Mormon. This way, they could inflate their numbers, on the books.

I still don’t really get the factual basis behind this question. is there any other entity besides the Mormons and their hokieness that keeps “census” records for thousands of years? Or was that just imprecise verbiage?

@janbb My mom has been doing genealogy searches for decades now. She has gone through millions of baptism, marriage, and death records in Canada’s, American and European history.

There are lots more on wills, housing, tax records, employment, and lots more.

The Vatican has large collections of the world’s past in their library

@RedDeerGuy1 Ok. That makes it clearer but I think you’re really talking more about 100s rather than thousands of years. Precision in language helps.

@janbb Ok. Thanks. My mom is around the 16–17th century in some areas. She has written 6 books on family genealogy.