William J. Hopkins already knew a bit about genealogy work when he arrived at the Utah State Prison in 1994, an interest that was sparked in his teens by an aunt who is a family historian.
Hopkins, 40, now spends two to three hours a day working on family history projects — his own and that of others — at the Family History Center at the prison’s Wasatch unit. He is an arbitrator, someone who reviews duplicate data entered by various indexers to ensure the information corresponds and then enters one copy into a database. Hopkins also tutors fellow inmates on how to do family research.