Our tour ended at the Mormon Tabernacle, home of the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who obviously hadn't planned for our arrival as they let us down rather badly by not performing while we were there. Still, you can't have everything. The building is certainly impressive, being a domed structure 250 feet long and 80 feet high - but I decided not to mention St Paul's Cathedral as our guides were clearly very excited about the whole thing and under the impression that it was the most original thing in the universe.

Inside, the organ is one of the most impressive things I've seen in quite a while - with well over eleven thousand pipes producing its distinctive sound, its construction must be one of the greatest feats of engineering of all time. As technology has moved on, the organ has been powered first by bellows, then by water, and now of course by electricity, but making these changes and keeping it up to date has required regular maintenance and for the whole thing to be dismantled and rebuilt on more than one occasion. You can see where the ten percent of their wages which followers put into the church goes, can't you?

The LDS sees music and song as a major part of worship, so the Tabernacle Choir has increased in size since its inception in 1847 (when it was run by a man called George Careless, who surely must have been referred to by everybody as Careless George) from just a handful of members to just over 350 today - they are so well known around the world that they regularly go on tour and release albums which are snapped up as soon as they hit the shelves. One of the things I find particularly strange is that the choir was created as an afterthought so that there would be something to match the scale of the Tabernacle and the organ, rather than the other way around. The Tabernacle itself has such astounding acoustic properties that, according to the website, a pin dropped at the pulpit can be clearly heard 170 feet away at the back. It is slightly strange to me, therefore, to discover while writing up this entry that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir no longer perform in the Tabernacle which they were created to be a part of - since 2004, they have had to make do with the nearby conference centre.

After our guides had finished showing us around, we were led into the visitors centre where a disembodied voice from a statue of Jesus Christ informed us all matter of factly that he really loved us. Perhaps he'd had a few to drink. Finally, we were all sat on a wall while the guides stood in front of us and said that they hoped we'd had a great time looking around their beautiful temple. Then they handed out pamphlets, reminded us once again that Jesus really loved us just in case the statue towering over us in the visitors centre hadn't made it clear enough already, and asked if it would be at all okay if they sent somebody around to our house when we got home to give us a copy of the book of Mormon. I don't think it will come as a huge surprise to discover that the vast majority of us politely declined this offer, although you really could see some of the younger men in the group seriously battling with the idea of inviting a beautiful smiley Mormon girl around to their house...

So, where do I stand on the whole Mormon thing? Well, as you'll know if you'd read my account of the Buddhist temple on Phuket in A Hole In The Hat, I've always been very interested in the belief systems of the world, although I've always considered myself more of a spiritual person than a religious one. Mormonism is one of the faiths which, rightly or wrongly, tends to get poked fun at by stand up comedians, perhaps because some of it's principle beliefs sound to the rest of us to be slightly on the wacky side - but then, everything sounds wacky to those who don't believe in it. The Mormons believe that a man called Joseph Smith, perhaps a slightly ordinary name for a prophet, stumbled upon a set of golden plates sometime back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These plates, he said, had been buried in a box for centuries and had been protected by an angel called Moroni. Furthermore, Moroni had directed him to find the plates but would not allow him to actually take them away until four years after he had discovered them, during which time he had had to prove that he was worthy. Quite how he did this is unknown. Having finally taken possession of the plates, Joseph Smith then found that they were written in an ancient language which nobody understood any more, but luckily - he said - the angel gave him the power to translate them by peering into seer stones which he had dug up during his previous life as a treasure hunter. Much is made, probably quite understandably, of the fact that Joseph Smith then said that the angel commanded him not to show the plates to anybody, and he supposedly gave them back to the angel and never saw them again. The texts which he had translated from the plates then became the book of Mormon, which Mormons believe is actually a sort of "lost gospel" to the bible written by another witness to Jesus' life. Make what you will of this. In actual fact, Joseph Smith did show the plates to eleven people after pressure from society forced him to do so, but only, he said, after God had given him permission to do so. Eight of the witnesses were members of Joseph Smith's family, including his brothers, his father and his brother-in-law - so hardly credible witnesses. The other three said that they had heard the voice of God telling them that the plates had been translated under his guidance, but then went on to deny the whole thing later and even join churches which denounced Mormonism. In any case, the original signed testimony of the last three witnesses has appeared in nearly every version of the Book of Mormon since, which must be the only case in history of a religious text coming with a signed testimony at the back from people saying "Yep, this actually happened. Honest."

Today, I visited the Mormon Genealogy library here in Salt Lake City. This has got to be one of the most staggering projects ever undertaken, especially when you consider that the LDS can't possibly get anywhere near as much out of it as they provide to the community, and the library has become one of the other reasons that people set off across the world to Utah. The Mormons have worked tirelessly since the end of the nineteenth century to compile what must be close to a complete record of everybody's family history, and have stuck it all on file for anyone to search. The original purpose was to aid in research for members of the LDS who wanted to research their ancestry, but the whole thing quickly got out of all proportion and it seemed only natural to allow anyone to just walk in and make use of the data. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it must've been to store and retrieve anything from the records before the days of computers - and don't think, either, that this is a niche market which is only of interest to a select group of people doing very specialised research: the library estimates that around two thousand people walk through its doors every single day looking to find out who their ancestors were.

Walking into the library building, which spans 150,000 square feet over five floors, you are immediately met by a smiley Mormon who will show you to a computer terminal and explain the system to you - there's never any danger of turning up and finding all the computers taken, as there are literally hundreds on every floor. All the information the Mormons have gathered is stored on either microfilm or computer, and you can take as long as you like sitting in front of a screen or watching records whizzing past as you turn the k*** on the microfilm machines. When you've found what you're looking for, you can have the microfilm pages burnt onto CD Rom or printed out to take home, but it's not likely to be quite as easy as that unless your name happens to be something ridiculously unusual - expect many hours of tireless research. People are known to travel to Salt Lake City from all of the world just to research their family tree, coming laden down with rucksacks full of research material ready for several days of sitting in front of a terminal poring over every word of every document. People can be seen sitting outside sipping water from a bottle in Temple Square, taking a five minute break from an eight hour stint at a PC inside. Quite why the Mormons have gone to so much effort to put everybody's family tree, birth and death records on file for all to see rather than just researching their own followers is something of a puzzle - they'll tell you that it's just in their nature to be ridiculously helpful, and it is very difficult these days to find an ulterior motive. Even the amount they charge to print out whatever you find, or to get a blank CD to burn it onto, is next to nothing - a CD, for example, will cost you $1.50. While I was there, there were always people around to help and to show me how to operate the machines, and I was only ever a few yards away from a smiling Mormon lady only too eager to direct me to wherever I needed to be. There are entire sections of the library dedicated to books on genealogy and family research, and the people who work there seem to be so well versed in the systems that they can take you instantly to anything. A large part of the database is now searchable online at the library website, although I don't suppose they could possibly get it all on - you certainly wouldn't be able to search through the microfilm records without being there in person. To give you an idea of the scale of data we're talking about here, the website currently lists the library as holding 2.4 million rolls of microfilm, 724,000 microfiche records, 310,000 books, and an ancestral database which contains 36 million names linked to complete family records. What the library is not is a record of persons currently living or recently alive, as this would probably constitute an invasion of privacy - the records cover people who lived before 1930, so it is a perfect place for researching your great grandparents and their ancestors. I wasn't particularly expecting to find much, due in part to the fact that my original family name was not Burford and that my ancestors were Huguenots in France who spent much of the last few thousand years being persecuted for being protestants - the most famous example of which was the St Bartholomew's day massacre of 1572. Nevertheless, my smiley helper had only to press a couple of buttons and turn a couple of k*** before various documents relating to my ancestry were flashing up on the screen - nothing earth shattering on this occasion, but then I hadn't been sitting in the library poring through microfilm for days as most people seem happy to do.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.