Gerald M. Haslam was born August 7, 1949 at Logan, Utah. He grew up in South Salt Lake City, Utah, and served a full time proselyting mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Norway from 1968-1970. He obtained his bachelor of arts in print journalism from the University of Utah in 1972, his master of arts in history from the University of Utah in 1974. He obtained his Ph.D. in history from Brigham Young University in 1981. Haslam is an associate professor of history, having been employed at BYU for thirty years. For the first ten years of his employment, he worked as a genealogical researcher for Family History Services (now defunct) which provided research for hire to clients wanting to trace their roots. Since 1991 he has taught full time at Brigham Young University. He specializes in Scandinavian History from the Vikings to the Welfare State; Scandinavian Family History Sources (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland); and Professional Family History Research for Clients. He has also taught classes on Irish Family History; Scottish Family History; English Family History; Germanic Family History; and Northeastern States Family History. He has published a variety of articles on family and Scandinavian history, and two books, Clash of Cultures: The Norwegian Experience with Mormonism, 1851-1920 (Berne, Switzerland, and New York, New York: Peter Lang, 1984); and NFS Grundtvig's Faedrenearv (NFS Grundtvig's Patriarchal Inheritance) (Aarhus, Denmark: Grundtvig Society of 1947, 1998). The last-mentioned book treats the intellectual development of the Danish theologian, Grundtvig, under his father who was a Lutheran Priest in the late 1700s and early 1800s in Udby about seventy miles south of Copenhagen.

He is married to Zulaima S. Haslam, a native of Venezuela. By a first marriage he has six children- three boys and three girls. He is an avid book collector of local and family histories (about 7,000 volumes), most of which has been bought in secondhand bookshops all over the US and in Europe. He enjoys Classical music, especially pieces by Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer. He speaks Norwegian and German and reads Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and Dutch. In 2000, he directed BYU London Study Abroad, serving about a hundred students. He has traveled widely, visiting seventeen different countries, most recently (December 2011) the Philippines and Malaysia; and in April 2012, traveled to his favorite city, London, England, for the thirty-third time.