[Avodah] Are there halachic issues with using the Mormon fmaily history web site?

[Simon Montagu]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 5:04 AM, kennethgmiller at juno.com
<kennethgmiller at juno.com> wrote:

> I have heard that it is a goal of the Mormon church to accumulate as much of this information as they can, because at a certain point, when they have enough genealogical information about a person, they baptize that person by proxy. To me, this is a good enough reason to avoid giving them any information whatsoever, even if it is mutar to use the information they make available.
>
> It would not be good Public Relations for the Mormons to state their intentions as bluntly as I've put it, but subtly-veiled references to it can be found, if one looks hard enough, for example at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_History_Library  (I also concede the possibility that I've been the victim of a nasty urban legend, but I am not sufficiently motivated to bother researching that possibility.)

As far as I know this is true, and the Mormons don't make any
particular secret of it -- it is the reason why they accumulate
genealogical data in the first place.

It certainly gave me a queasy feeling when I saw in their database
that various of my ancestors had already been posthumously "baptized"
by the Mormons, but why should we really care? I don't see that
whatever ceremony is involved has any actual halachic significance.