Six Things You Should Know About the Ordinances Ready App

https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/ordinances-ready/

The new Ordinances Ready app has engendered a fair amount of discussion among the active genealogist and family historians in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have decided that a lot of the discussion originates from a lack of understanding about the app itself. I decided there are at least five major issues that underlie developing an appreciation for what the Ordinances Ready app is apparently intended to accomplish. The following are mostly my own opinion but that opinion is based on how the app works and some of the existing challenges with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

If you need an introduction to the Ordinances Ready App, I suggest reading "Ordinances Ready: FamilySearch App Feature Helps Find Temple Ordinances for Your Ancestors" and for further questions about the app I suggest two of my previous blog posts: "A Question about the Ordinances Ready App" and "How Reliable is the Ordinances Ready App?"

1. The Ordinances Ready App is structured to resolve two main challenges: how to get more individuals in the Church to become involved in the Family Tree and how to begin to reduce the surplus of user-submitted names waiting to be processed in the Temples. The first challenge is addressed by the fact that the app is intended to be used by each person individually to discover some ancestors or relatives that likely need the Temple ordinances. Each individual should take the time to click on the names provided and see how they are related and also learn about each of the people. To answer the second challenge the app is designed to choose names as follows (based a slide used by Ron Tanner at one of his RootsTech presentations).

1. Pulled from your own reservation list
2. Pulled from your own names that you have shared with the Global Temple List
3. Pulled names from people with whom you are related from the Global Temple List
4. Pulled from names found by searching up and down your own family lines (green icons)
5. An ancestor from the Global Temple List

In order to do this, the app will also consider the following:

• Ignore people who are subject to the 110-year rule
• Verify that the name qualifies for temple ordinance work
• Verify no possible duplicates

If you do select a name and leave it on your Temple list, the names will expire after 90 days, i.e. they will go back to the Global Temple List. Further, as far as possible the names will be added from your own Temple District. 

2. One of the problems I frequently see with the Family Tree and hear about from others is that people who have little or no knowledge of how it works or what is required are making changes. If this group of people does not feel compelled to "mess with the Family Tree" in order to "find a name to take to the Temple." Although the Ordinances Ready App is not specifically designed to discourage people from working with the Family Tree, it may have the effect of cutting down on the number of people, especially young people, who feel like they have to do something without knowing what they are doing. 

3. The Ordinances Ready app works with the online mobile app called the FamilySearch Tree. Although the FamilySearch Tree app does much of what the main FamilySearch.org Family Tree can do, it is limited and adding random names is not as easily done as it is on the desktop Family Tree. In addition, the FamilySearch Tree app is available to a rapidly growing number of people who only have access to the internet with a mobile smartphone. 

4. The Ordinances Ready app opens up a whole new way to discover areas in your part of the Family Tree that may be "ripe" for research. When you find a name of a person that needs Temple ordinances, you are already in a part of the Family Tree where either work is being done to add names or where no work has been done for years, either way, you know that the family where this name was found is where some work on the Family Tree needs to be done. 

5. You no longer have to feel the burden of maintaining a long list of people in your own Temple List. You can release those names to the temples and know that they will then become priority names for all of your relatives who use the Ordinances Ready app. Also, you do not need to worry about providing names for your family members. They are supposed to go onto the Ordinances Ready app and get their own names, even the younger members of your family. Also, there is no need to feel like you are pressured to supply names for a youth group or your entire Ward. Again, each individual should log onto the program and use the app to find their own names to take to the temple. 

6. The names produced by the Ordinances Ready App are not verified by FamilySearch or anyone else including the Church. You are responsible to make sure that the person actually exists and is not a duplicate. If you do the ordinance work without checking, you may be doing a duplicate. Although the app checks for duplicates, there are still duplicates that the program cannot find but may be obvious with some work. 

If you work through all your issues with clicking on green icons or duplicates, you will see that the Ordinances Ready app is designed to avoid both those issues as far as it is possible to do so today.