Thank you LDS

July 24 marks the 160th anniversary of the day Mormon pioneers arrived in Utah, celebrated as Pioneers Day in the State. In common with many genealogists who are not members I am grateful to the LDS Church for the genealogical resources they make available free or at cost.

The Salt Lake Tribune recently ran an article under the headline "Don't sanitize history, Mormons say" which reflects on the Church's uneven attitude toward its own history, and revealing the results of a survey of 2,000 LDS Church members involved in genealogy online. Those surveyed are "... looking for the whole story, accounts of real people and a wider scope of history than early 19th-century (Mormon) pioneers" and for it to be easily available online.

The survey doesn't contain much of interest to non-members of the Church, but the call for information to be easily available online is one genealogist users of LDS web services would echo. I'm looking forward to helping that along with something more applicable to my interests and background than the 1900 US census, currently the only data-set offered for indexing on the Family Searching Indexing web site.

The Great Irish Famine was in process at the same time as the Mormon pioneers were in migration. It be timely to move ahead with making available the promised Irish civil registration indexes for online indexing.