This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Kirby Cane, Norfolk, England •

My wife and I are standing in front of All Saints Kirby Cane, a centuries-old church that played a key role in me becoming a social nuisance 400-plus years later and 5,000 miles away.

Over my left shoulder is a small doorway into the church. For nearly a millennium, my ancestors emerged from it freshly christened, nervously married or recently dead.

Within a dozen miles of this place are others that contributed to my bloodline — Kirby Bedon, Kirby Row, Kirby Run and what appeared to be Kirbyshire but could just as easily be Kirbyshite. The stone was weathered and hard to read.

When I suggested the possibility to a passing local, she was not amused. She primly cautioned me against making such public comparisons or risk offending someone. My wife laughed out loud then.

Anyway, I'm in the middle of where the Kirby in me comes from. Various versions of my surname — Kirksby, Corbie, Kerby, Kertsby and Curby — appear on signposts, shopfronts, and parks.

Traveling back in time can reveal a lot about who we are and how we came to be it. For example, there's even the quaint sounding "Kurbie-On-Gibbet," a long-gone village in which an entire family of bothersome knaves was hanged in the 16th Century.

But of all the things bearing the marks of my ancestors' passage, it was the ancient churches like this one that got to me.

A short drive through East Anglia reveals more church towers and spires pointing heavenward than you'll see in Provo. And those are just the ones that haven't been allowed to fall down or were deliberately torched in some bloody ecclesiastical squabble.

The Saxon and Norman towers in tiny hamlets have for centuries marked the precise locations where people congregated and tied their lives together. They were, in fact, the centers of their worlds.

Strip away all the vexing parts of organized religion — and let's not kid ourselves that there isn't a lot of it — there remains the social benefits of community churches. For thousands of years, people hooked up at them.

My sixth-great-grandfather may have gotten an early start in some moonlit haymow, but it's the nearby church where his alarmed parents hastened to make him respectable. And it was the church that recorded the event, later helping me to backtrack who I am.

Peering into one of the windows behind me, I can almost see my own church congregation back home. There's the Pioneer 6th Ward sitting on the pews and forming the ties that will bind us together, no matter how far we eventually scatter.

Speaking of scattering, it was also church that separated me from this place. In 1853, enthusiastic Mormon missionaries convinced several of my ancestors that Utah was the place to be. I've been in England a week and still can't believe we actually left.

But there's a lot of me still here and remains to be seen. Given my ancestors' centuries-old attachment to this particular piece of ground, I'm part Saxon, Celt, Norman, Druid, Scot, and Viking. Even better, the blood of the Iceni threads its way through me.

In A.D. 60, the Iceni revolted against enforced Roman convention. Boudica, the Mad Queen of the Britons, led an army — in which my kin almost certainly marched — out of East Anglia. Among other really scary things, the Iceni burned London to the ground.

This behavior explains a lot about me to me. Conversely, the fact that Roman legions later defeated Boudica doesn't bother me a bit. Today there's a statue of Grandma Boudica in the center of London. I didn't see one in Rome.

Genealogy is so cool.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.