I have never violated the Jewish bit, but I have done research and temple work on the family of a dead celebrity. A Mormon celebrity, but one unrelated to me: Arthur Kane, bassist for the New York Dolls.
It started innocently enough. I saw the 2005 documentary about his life in rock music and later conversion to Mormonism and was charmed to my toes by his story. His calling in the church had been helping others with their family history research, and he spoke about his own troubled family life, so being a genealogist myself I was immediately curious to see how well he had done with his own family history. In looking at the Church's records, I found the sort of research you'd expect from someone who was poor, completely estranged from his family, and a non-professional researcher--his information was limited and often incorrect. It was clear that he'd been working from indexes available in the local Church genealogy library rather than from original records and had stalled pretty much where his own family knowledge gave out--how could he have afforded to send away for copies of actual records when he was so poor, living off Social Security Disability and pawning his guitars to make ends meet? The date he had for his parents' marriage was off by years, and he hadn't been able to trace his family back very far, particularly his father's family.
I decided, since his family was from New York and I was at the time developing an expertise in New York City records, that I'd see how much I could find on his family, just to test my abilities. I had no intention of submitting for temple work any new names that I found--I knew the Church's policies--but I figured it couldn't hurt to do some quality research to test myself and then leave the information out there for some future LDS convert in his own family to find and use.
As I researched, however, I found out that Arthur had had an even more lonely family life than I had imagined. As he said in the movie, he was an only child, his mother died when he was a teenager, he later clashed with his father and stepmother, and he left home young and never spoke to family again. He was so completely cut off that he learned in his middle age (through checking the Social Security Death index) that his father had died years before. I found in my research that he also had no half-siblings from his father's second marriage, no surviving aunts, uncles, or grandparents. No cousins, as his sole uncle (father's brother) had died at age eight and his sole aunt (mother's sister) had died unmarried and childless. I succeeded in tracing his father's line back to Ireland and, after spending about $50 of my own money on various records, hit the jackpot: an Irish census record that listed his great-grandparents and a bunch of children, including his grandfather.
So I decided to submit for temple work the names I had found that were not included in Arthur's research: his uncle who died young, his paternal grandparents, his paternal-paternal great-grandparents and all their children. I let my family in on my secret and they helped me get the temple work done.
I hope no one ever has cause to be offended by my sole technical violation of the Church policy on temple name submissions. I love researching my own family and believe in the importance of working on our own families: learning about and serving the people we didn't choose to be connected to--who might be downright un-good people, or at least not as exciting as our chosen heroes--but for whom we are commanded to nonetheless develop a special love. I have no desire to mess with the proxy baptismal status of even my favorite dead celebrities in an effort to give a weird artificial thrill to temple work. But Arthur was one of us, and he loved family history, he loved temple work and did the best he could for his own family with the time and resources he had, and he had no one else likely to stumble on his dead family branch (the closest living relative he could possibly have would be a second cousin, and how many of us are even aware of the existence of our second cousins?) So.....yeah. So endeth my confession. I hope they won't kick me off New FamilySearch for this--I've done a lot of indexing for them, so I hope that redeems me in the Grand Scheme.
And if not, I will humbly endure a tongue-lashing from the living and/or the dead.
