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Please feel free to make the contents of this post available to any of your Ward or Stake members or leaders who may have a need to see or use the new Family History Activity Reports.
Beginning with the April 2017 reports, the new Family History Activity Reports are now widely available to Ward and Stake leaders and Temple and Family History Consultants. Some Stakes were in the Beta program and had early access to the reports. Overall indications are that the new effort to raise the members' awareness of family history is having a positive impact on activity church-wide. The Report for May 2017 was just made available as of the date of this post.
Access to the new Reports is through the Leaders and Clerks Resources on LDS.org. Authorization to view the Reports is tied to the description of a member's calling in the Member and Leader Services program or MLS. For example, if your calling was as a Ward Family History Consultant, your calling in the MLS needs to be updated to Temple and Family History Consultant in order to view the reports.
The first section of the Family History Activity Report is a graph showing the number of members submitting at least one name to the Temple during the calendar year compared to the previous year. You can see a representative report above. The green line indicates that there are more people submitting in this Ward than the previous year. Here is a sample of a Stake FHAR.
My experience here in Provo, Utah is that the increases are due to the activity of the newly designated Temple and Family History Consultants helping individual members to obtain names through the FamilySearch.org website. There is also a direct correlation with the availability of the FamilySearch.org website and the fact that it now works. Much of this increase is directly attributable to the developer and programmer team at FamilySearch who finally got the Family Tree working properly and continue to upgrade and maintain the website.
The next section of the Report shows the number of members who have some entries in the First Four Generations of their Ancestors in the Tree (FamilySearch.org Family Tree).
The next section of the Report indicates the number of members logging in to FamilySearch. It is interesting that even though the report shows an increase in members submitting names, this particular section may show a decrease in overall activity.
The last section of the report shows a breakdown in the numbers of members participating by submitting names to the temples.
The stake level reports contain statistics about each of the wards in the stake.
How are the YSAS numbers calculated? Many wards say that they do not have that many members in their ward, do they come from the YSA Wards/Brandhes? Do they not have their own reports for their wards?
ReplyDeleteThey are calculated the same way as every other ward or branch. The are all Adults for the reports.
DeleteIs there a list of youth that are counted YTD? We have checked with each of the YM/YW in our ward and the number is 21. but the report for our ward thru December 2018 shows 15 out of 41. What are we doing wrong?
ReplyDeleteThe statistics come from the Members and Leaders program (MLS) maintained by the Ward or Branch Clerk. You would have to review who was being counted as a youth with the clerk to see why the numbers seem to vary. Perhaps the Ward Clerk has not removed youth who have moved or have advanced due to birthdays.
DeleteI really like these reports. Why is there such a time lag between the end of the month and the generation of that month's report?
ReplyDeleteWho knows? But they have been later in coming. Sorry.
DeleteJames, could you explain a bit more about the First Four Generations chart? Our ward has 66 percent. Does this mean that 66 percent of members have entered at least their own names in their own page? Is this recording adult members only? Now that those who are at least 8 years old can have their own accounts in familysearch, does this mean that 66 percent of the members in my ward have their own accounts and have entered their own names in family search? Or, does it mean that 66 percent of those members in our ward that have accounts have entered something in their four generations? I am interested because better information on this could help us know where we can focus our efforts - ie, completing four generations, introducing members to the memories section, helping those who have completed four generations to identify using decendency functions, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, that is the number of Ward members who have 4 generations in the Family Tree. Here is what the instructions say:
DeleteThe middle section of the report features three different charts. The first chart on the left shows the current percentage of first four generation ancestors in FamilySearch Family Tree for members of the unit. In addition, it shows the trend over the past two years.
See https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/family-history-report-lcr/