I opened my morning paper today to find that a good share of the front page of the Utah section was given over to an article titled “Prisoners track family trees – LDS Church program engages hundreds.” The article was continued on page 4 – and gave a decent synopsis of the current state of things in the 4 family history centers found at the Utah State Prison down in Draper.
Inmates have been doing their own genealogy, as well as indexing of genealogy documents, in the centers for years now. Long before it was popular to do FamilySearch Indexing, prisoners were creating indexes for the Freedman’s Bank project, a project that took eight years to complete. According to the article, prison-wide, the prisoners extract between 500,000 and 1 million names per year. It seems to be a popular activity, as it get the folks out of the normal prison environment, and into one that’s actually fun.
Internet access is very limited, and the names they are extracting are only those who have been long-dead, thus guarding against any possible identity theft. The FHCs are open 7 days a week, and inmates spend a lot of time there, some up to 8 hours a day. About 600 inmates are involved.
I’ve been involved only peripherally with the prison Family History Centers over the years. Every now and then at Heritage Quest, we would pack up boxes of books for the inmates. Just a few months ago, I had the opportunity to donate a set of Dollarhide’s Census Substitutes & State Census Records, Volumes one, and two. I’ve been told that they are some of the prison Family History Center’s most used volumes.
Read the article about all this in the March 21, 2009 edition of the Deseret News online.
