Ancestry Magazine

Ann Zundel thinks family history programs can work miracles in the lives of fractured families. She sees it nearly every day: tough men moved to tears by their discoveries of ancestors who overcame incredible hardships to survive. Men who barely have a place in their present families who find a sense of self from the past. Men who use their newfound knowledge of that past to build a bridge to the future with their own children.

Zundel is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and was working as a volunteer at the Mesa Regional Family History Center in Mesa, Arizona, when she fielded an unusual request.

“My husband was serving in the prison ministries in Florence, teaching a class, and he happened to mention that I was involved in family history,” says Zundel. “The inmates in his class were very taken by that and asked him, rather timidly, if I would consider teaching a class on family history in the prison.”

Ann Zundel said no. The thought of getting involved with the prison terrified her. Then, the more she thought about it, the more she got up the nerve to give it a try. Now, after helping hundreds of inmates research their family histories, Zundel is trying to get an official family history program established in the Arizona State Prison at Florence. It’s a bit of an uphill battle, says Zundel, because prison officials are leery of new programs. And rightfully so. There’s a lot involved in setting up something like this in a prison. It’s not just about finding space and getting donations of equipment and reference materials. There’s also the very real issue of security and a host of societal issues regarding the role and accessibility of educational and rehabilitative activities in the lives of prisoners.

In spite of the difficulties Zundel has encountered, she persists because she is convinced that giving inmates access to genealogical research can bring families of the incarcerated together in a way that is unique and very powerful.

Those who work to help children maintain ties with their incarcerated parents would agree. Ann Adalist-Estrin is director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerate (NRCCFI). She hasn’t studied family history programs specifically—mainly because they’re so rare—but she has learned a lot from 30 years of working with children of the incarcerated.

“One thing I hear from kids I work with is that there are many feelings generated by having a parent in prison, and one of them is a feeling of being disconnected from their past,” says Adalist-Estrin. “They also get a feeling that they are defined by their father’s or mother’s incarceration. Knowing more about their family history can give them a much fuller context for who they are.”

One barrier Adalist-Estrin sees is the idea among some groups that children with incarcerated parents should not have contact with that parent, the idea being that a bad citizen can’t be a good parent. But, she points out, children love and want to be involved with their parents regardless of what negative choices that parent may have made. The solution is not separation, but programs that build family ties.

Research done by the Pittsburgh Child Guidance Foundation bears this out. The foundation conducted a two-year study as the initial phase of a six-year initiative to mobilize community support for children of prisoners. What they discovered, says executive director Claire Walker, is that there are many obstacles standing in the way of communication between children and their incarcerated parents.

“What I like about the idea of genealogical research is that this is a way of communicating the real bonds that tie generations together,” says Walker. “Everyone brings something into this. You become, as the parent, the vessel of transmission to the child’s past.”

Greg Sampson, who asked that his real name not be used to protect his family’s privacy, is a living example of the potential of prison genealogical research programs. Sampson was an inmate in Florence prison, serving a three-year sentence for a parole violation, when “Sister” Zundel, as he calls her, came to his ward to introduce a family history class. He became fascinated with the idea of building a family tree.

“I had a lot of spare time, so I began contacting my family members and asking them what they knew about our past,” says Sampson. “To my great surprise, these contacts and my research went far beyond just helping me establish a consensus about our ancestors. Having this project helped me restore relationships that I had lost with these family members due to my incarceration and gave me something to talk about with them besides my incarceration.”

By the time he was released, Sampson was so taken with his research that he relocated to Utah to be closer to the resources offered there by the LDS Church. Sampson is now a changed man, truly contrite, and a productive member of society. He was able to start a successful business, and he continues with his genealogical research. He credits that research with knitting back together the family ties that had unraveled because of the bad decisions he made in the past. His work researching his family’s history not only brought him back together with his extended family—it helped his children see him in a new light.

“There’s a family spirit that wasn’t there previously,” says Sampson. “We realized that we can learn lessons from the past, and we can overcome adversity and make positive changes and move on from what we are to what we have the potential to be. This has given our lives meaning and given us a sense of identity.”

Kelly Burgess is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer.

Where It Started
Keith Jepson has heard stories like inmate Greg Sampson’s many times over. One of his most moving memories is of the big, tough inmate moved to tears by the sight of his great-great-grandfather’s name on the manifest of the ship that brought him from England to America.

Jepson is coordinator of the family history centers at the Utah State Prison facility in Draper, Utah, which are the inspiration and the model for Ann Zundel’s work in Arizona. The sprawling Utah complex is home to seven different correctional facilities. Of the seven, four have their own family history centers: Wasatch and Oquirrhs, both medium security prisons for men; Promontory, a medium security therapeutic community for treating drug abusers; and Timpanogos, which houses female inmates.

Draper’s program began in 1988 as a Sunday School class taught by volunteers from the LDS Church. Interest was so strong that it became an official program in 1990. According to a Salt Lake Tribune article from 1998, “the genealogy program was launched with four film readers, two microfiche readers and one copy machine.”

Now, says DeAnne Shelley, Director of Training at South Point Family History Center in Wasatch Prison, the Wasatch center alone has 45 computers, 14 film readers, seven fiche readers, and one scanner. It employs seven intake clerks and has an additional 56 inmates who volunteer as clerks. It’s open eight hours a day and has approximately 200 inmates enrolled in the program. Shelley says some of those men are there from open until close.

In addition to helping the inmates with genealogical research, Shelley teaches college-level courses at the prison. Upon graduation, inmates can earn certificates attesting to skills they can use when they get back into the world to possibly find gainful employment in a genealogical field. Even if the ultimate goal isn’t specific to employment, numerous studies have shown that when inmates engage in constructive activities in prison, management and behavioral problems decrease.

Greg Sampson agrees. “You have time to do things on your own, but it’s a situation where every individual can choose to use their time productively or not. Having this program available is one more opportunity to make a better choice.”

Community Service
The most unique component of the family history program at the correctional facility at Draper, Utah, is not the research the inmates do on their own behalf but the work they’re doing to benefit the rest of the world. According to the prison’s FHC coordinator, Keith Jepson, the initial focus of the family history program was on extractions: inmates would pull names from old records and put them on microfilm so they could be made accessible to genealogical researchers on the outside. From there, the program evolved into a facility for inmates to do their own research. However, the extraction process continues, and this volunteer effort by the inmates benefits professional and casual genealogical researchers every day. The only difference is that now the results of the inmate’s work are eventually put on the Internet by noninmate volunteers on the outside, where they are even more widely available.

Here are a few of the major extraction projects that have been completed by the inmates at Draper:

1880 U.S. Census (800,000 names)
Freedman’s Bank (485,000)
Ellis Island Records (384,686)
Ohio Publications 1–4 (325,942)
Elijah Abel (161,000)
England Extractions (68,040)
Ohio Death Records (63,600)
1881 Canada Census (22,116)
Cemetery Records of Utah (918,430)

The extraction work is so popular that Jepson estimates there are close to 800 inmates involved in the program at any one time across the four centers. And remember, not just any inmate can participate—each one has to earn the right to do the work.