The Challenge of Duplication of Temple Work -- Opening Comments

I am going to begin this discussion with an amazing prophetic quote from Nephi Anderson made in 1912:

… Let me suggest the future of this work. I see the records of the dead and their histories gathered from every nation under heaven to one great central library in Zion—the largest and best equipped for its particular work in the world. Branch libraries may be established in the nations, but in Zion will be the records of last resort and final authority. 

Trained genealogists will find constant work in all nations having unpublished records, searching among the archives for families and family connections. Then, as temples multiply, and the work enlarges to its ultimate proportions, this Society, or some organization growing out of this Society, will have in its care some elaborate, but perfect system of exact registration and checking, so that the work in the temples may be conducted without confusion or duplication.  

And so throughout the years, reaching into the Millennium of peace, this work of salvation will go on, until every worthy soul that can be found from earthly records will have been searched out and officiated for; and then the unseen world will come to our aid, the broken links will be joined, the tangled threads will be placed in order, and the purposes of God in placing salvation within the reach of all will have been consummated.  

We live in a day of small beginnings, as far as this is concerned. We are still pioneers. We are but helping to lay the foundation of the ‘marvelous work and a wonder that is about to come forth among the children of men’. (Emphasis added)

Nephi Anderson, "Genealogy’s Place in the Plan of Salvation," UGHM 3 (January 1912): 21-22. 

Unsuccessful efforts to eliminate duplication of research and Temple work date back as far as the 1890s. [See Allen, James B., Jessie L. Embry, and Kahlile B. Mehr. Hearts Turned to the Fathers: A History of the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1894-1994. Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, Brigham Young University, 1995, Page 96]. During those early years, all of the systems used to avoid duplication proved inadequate. I will return from time to time to the history of the efforts to avoid both types of duplication in future posts, but at this point more than 100 years after Nephi Anderson't prophecy and almost 120 years since the establishment of the Genealogical Society of Utah we are still facing exactly the same challenges only on a massive scale.

The present duplication of both research and Temple work exceeds imagination. Most recently, many of the features of the New.FamilySearch.org (NFS) program facilitated rather than impeded duplication. Since NFS is still in operation, it is still too early to tell if the full implementation of FamilySearch.org's Family Tree will have any effect at all on the duplication issue. (By the way, I am choosing to no longer link my posts to the NFS website).

I am not privy to any statistics showing the exact amount of duplication, so any comments I make are based entirely on my personal observations handling hundreds of Temple cards on a regular basis and working directly with patrons at the Mesa FamilySearch Library. Some of the basic issues I observe that likely lead to duplication included the following:

• Lack of sufficient documentation by researchers making a determination of the identity of a person impossible and making it equally as impossible to determine if the Temple work has already been done. Patrons tend to "give proceeding with the work" the default position is there is any question about identity even when the research has been inadequate or sloppy or both. 
• Allowing names to be qualified without any requirement of substantiation or even a cursory verification that the person's work had not been done previously.
• Allowing end of lines to be continued by merely copying in the surname and using Mr. and Mrs. as first name with approximate dates and very general places.
• Allowing individuals to be qualified even when the dates and places are imaginary or outside of reality. Such as work done for my ancestor supposedly born in Cottonwood, Utan in 1775. 
• Allowing names to be simply fabricated and still qualify.

I have personally observed all of these as causes of duplication.

Next, some thoughts on the historical methods used to avoid duplication.

The FamilySearch Discovery Center Initiative

FamilySearch is currently involved in reinventing the concept of the family history center. The project is referred to as "the FamilySearch Discovery Center Initiative." As mentioned in a blog post by The Ancestry Insider entitled "Über Cool Family History Center of the Future Shown at #FGS2013," the
mission statement of the new initiative is:

The Family Discovery Center offers individuals and families simple yet powerful in-person experiences to discover their heritage and have their hearts turned to their ancestors.

D. Merrill White of FamilySearch has been making presentations entitled, "Discovering the FamilySearch Family History Library of Tomorrow." He will apparently be presenting this same introduction to the new project at the Riverton FamilySearch Library on 16 November 2013. This will likely be similar to the presentation he made at the 2013 annual conference of the Federation of Genealogical Societies in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The details of the new FamilySearch Center experience are outlined in The Ancestry Insider's blog post referenced above. But overall, it is an effort to add cutting edge technology to present family history in a thought provoking and entertaining way. From the description, I am reminded of the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois, but likely on a much smaller scale. The post mentions that a first implementation of this concept may occur in a Ward building in Seattle, Washington.

The new Director of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah was quoted in a FamilySearch Blog post as saying:

Today, our research shows that the Family History Library and our centers are great places to do genealogical research. We need to figure out how to balance the needs of researchers while increasing appeal to those with other family history interests,” said Loosle. “You can’t attract a younger audience and offer the same experiences. We need to offer fun experiences and activities for the entire family that will increase love, appreciation, and understanding of their ancestors. 

In 2013-14, Diane says she has some very specific goals as the new director of the Family History Library: 

• Become more family and youth-oriented through providing interactive, discovery experiences.
• Enhance the services of the library through new collaborative research areas and better access to research staff.
• Engage more patrons from the geographic community surrounding the library.

It would be nice to be in Riverton next week for the presentation. Too bad I am so far away.

The Role of the Ward Family History Consultant

In visiting various Wards around the United States, I see a common theme. In each Ward I visit, I usually ask if they have a Family History Class during Sunday School. I takes a while to find the person who knows the answer but commonly, the answer is that the class is not being held. There are exceptions. But for the most part, Family History is viewed as an occasional subject for review from time to time. The basic issue here is that the calling of a Ward Family History Consultant is viewed as merely a responsibility for holding this occasional class without any further activity. Nothing could be further from the reality of the calling.

If you go to LDS.org and sign in, you can see a long list of resources from a link at the menu at the top of the startup page. Among those resources are those for family history. If you review the resources for family history, you will also find a link to resources for Family History Callings. Here you will see training for a Family History Consultant as well as the following:

• Stake Indexing Director
• Family History Center Director
• Area Family History Adviser
• FamilySearch Support Missionary
• Stake and Ward Leaders

If you take the time to review the online resource for Family History Consultants, you will soon see that the calling involves much more than merely holding a Sunday School class once or twice a year. The resources are mostly short videos in the following categories:

1. Understand Your Calling
2. Work with Members
3. Work with Leaders
4. Prepare Names for the Temple
5. Do Your Own Family History

Clear back in 1995, President Howard W. Hunter said the following in the Ensign:

There are some members who engage in temple work but fail to do family  history research on their own family lines. Although they perform a divine service in assisting others, they lose a blessing by not seeking their own kindred dead as divinely directed by latter-day prophets. 

I have learned that those who engage in family history research and then perform the temple ordinance work for those whose names they have found will know the additional joy of receiving both halves of the blessing.

President Howard W. Hunter, “A Temple-Motivated People,” Ensign, February 1995, 4–5 

In order for the Temple and Family History work to proceed in any Ward, it is necessary for the Family History Consultants to learn the entire responsibility of their callings.  

From LDS.org: Adding "Family" to Family History Work

In this video, Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles testifies of how family history helps Heavenly Father rescue and bless our ancestors, and Church members describe the inspiring process of working as a family to take their own family names to the temple.

Managing your Temple lists just became easier

FamilySearch.org has announced some major improvements to the Family Tree Temple lists. The changes are as follows:

• Your temple list loads more quickly than it did before. 
• You can scroll through the names on your list and still see the options at the top of the page.
• The temple list on FamilySearch.org has more sorting options than new.familysearch.org provided. Sorting is now as easy as clicking the column headings at the top of your list. (The Sort By drop-down list has been removed because it is no longer needed.)
• You can filter your list to see only specific people. Filtering your list temporarily reduces the number of names on your list to the people whose names contain specific characters that you enter or who have a specific ID number.

To sort the Temple list by a specific heading, all you do is click on the heading. When you sort by name, you can also click on a down arrow to sort by first name, last name, birth date, gender and ID number. Quoting from the announcement:

If you sort by Name, the list is sorted by the person’s full name in the order in which it is typically spoken. For example, names in English, Spanish, and other Western cultures are sorted by first name then last name, since that is the order in which the names are typically spoken. Asian names are sorted first by family name and then by given name.

It is very useful to know that this order of sorting is not just arbitrary, but was chosen for a specific purpose to make the sorting international in scope.

You can also click on Ordinances, Sealing, and date reserved. Ordinance sorting can be further sorted by Ordinance type. Sealings can be sorted by reserved or not reserved. Again quoting from the announcement, " If you have reserved all of the sealings for one family, this sort should bring all of the family members together, where you can easily find their names."

The changes in the program also allow you to filter your list by entering a few letters or numbers. Everyone with the chosen numbers or letters will be shown in the list. Don't forget to empty out the filter box if you want to see everyone on the list. When you filter your list, the numbers of ordinances at the top of your list change to reflect the number of people found by that filter in each portion of your list.

Comments on Getting the Genealogical Message to the Members of the Church

Despite the proliferation of sections of the main websites of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints many members are entirely unaware of the immense online resources contained on LDS.org and FamilySearch.org. As the website developments occur, there are blog posts and sometimes announcements in the Church News or in letters to the leaders, but significant segments of the membership of the Church frequently either ignore the messages or do not receive them at all. If this is the rule about general announcements made from and by the Church, the lack of interest and lack of impact of announcements about genealogy have even less impact on the members to the extent that almost none of the information about what is happening in genealogy gets to the general membership.

Although I fully realize the limited impact of a blog in trying to rectify this situation, this blog is partially aimed at increasing the media exposure of these valuable LDS resources. For this to work, it is necessary for the members to adjust to obtaining information, news and support from online sources. Because of my involvement in the genealogical community, I am painfully aware of the disconnect between the average member of the Church and the online world. How many members use the Church's LDS.org calendar, much less are using the genealogical resources online? It is interesting how little impact blogs and websites have on those who do not know of their existence. I am never surprised at the response to questions I ask about blog readership in the classes I teach about online genealogy.

In my own Ward, for example, although I have been an active blogger for the last five or six years, I doubt that there are more than two or three of the hundreds of members of the Ward that are even aware of my blogs or have read them at all regularly. Part of the problem is the nature of online communications in general. We are all flooded with content, most of which has no value or interest to us personally. In response, we have all built up personal filters that ignore nearly all of the huge number of messages we receive each day from the Internet, physical mailings, paper ads, signage, billboards and on and on. I presently have a garbage can sitting next to my desk that is frequently emptied but presently is almost full of "junk mail" received in the last two days almost all of which is advertising.

If we have content we feel is valuable for members of the Church, how do we package that message in a way that the members will begin to be aware of its existence? On a personal basis, how do we then filter out the unwanted messages and listen to those messages that have meaning and content we are interested in receiving. In the area of genealogy, this is a very difficult issue due, in part, to the ingrained antipathy of the average member to genealogy as a subject. I am reminded of an experience I had a year or so ago. I was speaking at a conference in a small Eastern Arizona community and while driving to the location of the presentation, we drove down a very dusty, dirt road obviously not heavily used. There on the side of the road was a sign on a stick with my picture advertising the conference. In my mind, this is an analogy for the entire genealogical community. We make a lot of noise inside the community but little of it escapes into the larger world of those uninterested in the genealogical community as such. As with the sign on the isolated dirt road, only the people who were already going to the conference would have seen the sign and read it.

Can we break out of this shell of obscurity surrounding online messages from the Church and in particular those pertaining to genealogy? Another example. The Mesa FamilySearch Library held a very successful conference recently. That free conference was announced in my own Ward's Sunday Bulletin every Sunday for about two months preceding the conference. Only one or two members in my Ward asked me about the conference and during the conference I do not remember seeing even one member of my Ward in attendance. In fact, the conference was so well attended, we had to turn people away because the numbers overwhelmed the room in the ASU Institute of Religion where the conference was held. But this came as a result of having a huge geographic area to draw from. The 600 people at the conference constituted a vanishingly small percentage of the LDS population in just Mesa, Arizona alone. The Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has over 4 million people and according to some statistics the LDS population of Arizona is between 5% and 10%. See Wikipedia: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership statistics (United States). Even if we take the lower number, the number of members in just the Phoenix area is over 200,000. The attendance at the conference was a very small percentage of even the LDS community and there were many people at the conference who were not members of the Church.

I will probably write about this topic from time to time. It is interesting to think about how to solve this lack of interest and the consequential lack of communication.

More Information about changes coming to the Indexing Program

In a previous blog post, I indicated that substantial changes were coming to the FamilySearch Indexing Program by the end of 2013. This is partially correct. The new indexing website will be launched later in 2013, but additional changes will come to the program itself in 2014. The changes coming in 2014 include:

• Enhanced project selection
• The ability to join multiple groups
• Achievements and recognition
• Facebook integration
• An improved beginner experience

All of these are discussed in the blog post entitled "The Future of Indexing."