SALT LAKE CITY \u00e2\u20ac\u201d All the way along the route to what locals call Mormon Central, I thought about my friend Vince Distasio, who was a colleague back in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, when we taught at Cuba High School.<\/p>\n
Back then, there were a lot of Highlands University alumni: Rosalie and Neil Niebes, Jack Bradley, Marcella Fuentes, Tomas Salazar, Elias Garcia, Joe Ray Atencio, Peter Arguello, Ruben Cordova, Robert Romero and me.<\/p>\n
What about the Mormon Tabernacle reminded me of my friend Vince? In brief, it was my wondering about ancestors and how much information the Church of Latter Day Saints had gathered about all the Trujillos and Medinas (and others) in my family tree. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been vacationing near Salt Lake City and thought of checking out the repository we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d heard much about.<\/p>\n
We never set foot inside the church itself. More than a city block of downtown Salt Lake City consists of ancillary buildings for the church; there are a couple of welcome centers, places inside and out for children to play, rooms where members of the world-famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir practice and perform, and \u00e2\u20ac\u201d one of the reasons we were there \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the vast amount of genealogical research the church has conducted. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s free, and at no time did any of us Trujillos feel disloyalty to our own congregation or pressured to donate to the Mormon cause, or join their congregation.<\/p>\n
The Latter Day Saints faith quite simply provides a great service to anyone of any faith \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or no faith at all \u00e2\u20ac\u201d seeking information on ancestry.<\/p>\n
Now, back to Vince:<\/p>\n
During my prep periods at the school, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d often join Vince\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s math-and-science class to learn about ideas he espoused. He said it was part of his Lower Manhattan, N.Y., background. Once he asked his students, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If I hired you to do menial, manual labor at my house and said I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d pay you a penny the first day, two pennies the second, four the next, eight cents on the fourth day . . . for how long would you work for me?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Some said they could make more money flipping burgers at the local Dairy Delight.<\/p>\n
Then Vince pushed it harder: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Would you work for 30 days?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Still no takers. Remember, any computations had to be on paper, as hand-held calculators hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t arrived. When the mathematical truth emerged, the class determined that the pay for the 30th day alone would be in the millions of dollars. Remember, each day doubles the amount.<\/p>\n
The students didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to be aware of that huge figure \u00e2\u20ac\u201d yet \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and Vince had them figure out how working even for 15 days would scarcely provide pocket change.<\/p>\n
Vince had tried a variation on that with me a few days earlier. The question he posed was about ancestors. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Everybody has (or has had) two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and 16 great-great grandparents. If you go back some 20 or 30 generations, everybody will have had millions of ancestors. And if this is true, why did the earth contain only a few hundred million people 30 generations ago?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
That got me to scratching my head until I finally snapped. Obviously, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not as if everyone has different ancestors. The five siblings in my family have had the same components of the family tree. And if we really want to push it, we can truthfully say that because of inevitable sharing of ancestors, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re connected to millions of people in 50 different ways.<\/p>\n
We hear about those who claim direct descendancy to Charlemagne or Shakespeare or William Penn or Miguel de Cervantes. One of my professors at Highlands often said that the difficult task would be to show that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not connected to some of these historical figures \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in dozens of ways.<\/p>\n
As I entered the Family History Library of the Mormon Church, I was armed with tidbits of factoids about heritage. A very pleasant volunteer escorted me to a bank of computers and took me through the paces. I first entered my name, found it, along with siblings, tios and tias, abuelos and abuelitas and too many cousins to count.<\/p>\n
There were copies of marriage certificates, records of birthplaces, and much more. One piece of information, which the LDS docent assured me was genuine, contained a few scrawls, undecipherable to me. The volunteer explained that the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153signer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d had been illiterate or maybe just secretive.<\/p>\n
We ran out of time but returned the next day, probing. Some of the findings were iffy: Given that my own dad may have been one of many Jose Trujillos, I refined the search to include his middle name, Demosthenes. That narrowed it down to only about 15, most of them born in northern New Mexico.<\/p>\n
Our stay in Salt Lake City is limited, so we were able to explore only a fraction of data on our family tree. But still, the urge to keep going back persists. The information gleaned from the genealogical center can also be obtained through one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s personal computer, so I suspect I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be doing yet more research at home.<\/p>\n
My Cuba friend Vince and I share a bit of affinity: He was born six days before me in 1939. We sometimes celebrate compromise birthdays on April 18. And each time we meet I remind him of his penny-for-the-first-day math problem as well as the how-many-ancestors-do-you-have? question.<\/p>\n
Yes, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an addiction. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want it to become an obsession, and I think I should have listened more to my mother, the late Marie Trujillo, who showed less than zero interest in climbing very far up the Trujillo-Medina tree.<\/p>\n
She once told me, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You might find out things you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather not know.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
If you had taken up my friend Vince\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 15-day offer, you would have received less than $22 a day. But if you stayed 30 days, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have $5,368,709.12 on the 30th day alone, and $10,737,418.24 (that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s million) for the entire month.<\/p>\n
Nice work if you can get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SALT LAKE CITY \u00e2\u20ac\u201d All the way along the route to what locals call Mormon Central, I thought about my friend Vince Distasio, who was a colleague back in the late \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, when we taught at Cuba High School. Back then, there were a lot of Highlands University alumni: Rosalie and Neil Niebes, Jack Bradley, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1397,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1396\/revisions\/1397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}