The FamilySearch Family Sharing Feature

If you are an active genealogical researcher, you may be finding a significant number of people to add to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. Some researchers boast of finding thousands of names. There are basically two types of people who have made large numbers of additions to the Family Tree: those who share their discoveries and those who hoard them.

For many years now, the FamilySearch.org website has allowed researchers to reserve names in a temple list. Hoarders have abused this opportunity to add more names to their list than could ever be done in their own lifetime or even the lifetime of their entire family. The people waiting for the ordinances to be done and are now on these hoarded lists are as securing locked up as they are in the Spirit Prison. Because of the hoarders, sometime in the future, the number of names that can be reserved will be limited.

During the past year or so, because of the hoarders, FamilySearch (and the Church) have imposed a time limit of two years on reserved names. The date the names will be removed from your reserved list appears on the list. If you perform an ordinance for a person, an additional year will be added to the time.

Notwithstanding the hoarders, for quite some time, there has also been a way to share names with the temples. So any excess names can be shared and go on the general list of names that can be used by the temples as needed. In addition, the relatively new Ordinances Ready function or app available on both the desktop and mobile versions of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree allows any potential temple patron, young or old, to obtain a name or names for ordinances from those names that have been shared with the temple.

Another feature that has been added to the Family Tree also retains the names you have shared with the temples on your Temple List. The names are marked in red and can be printed from the list as long as they have not been printed by the temples.

You can also still share names directly with family and friends. If you fail to share the names, then they will be shared for you on the date indicated. In talking to people about this process, I am already listening to people speculate and try to find ways to avoid "losing" the names from their temple lists instead of trying to find a way to go to the temple more frequently and do the ordinance work. I think we should view the fact that we have the opportunity to reserve some names as a privilege and just spend as much time as we can going to the temple to do the ordinances and not worrying about hoarding the names.