The Duty to Keep Accurate Temple Records

 I have been thinking recently about the importance of accurate record-keeping. This has been a constant recurring theme in my blog posts over the years mainly due to the fact that so many of the genealogy records that I encounter are sloppy, inaccurate and incomplete. I have used this example in my past writings. This is taken from New.FamilySearch.org and is a list of the name variations for one of my ancestors.

Francis Tanner
* Francis TANNER
France Tanner
Francis Tanner Esq.
Mr Mr Tanner
Mr. Mr. Tanner
Mr. Tanner
Tanner
William Tanner

The correct name was Francis Tanner. These particular variations were each recorded multiple times. In my mind, there is absolutely no excuse for this kind of research or whatever you want to call it. The historical record concerning the Tanner family back to Francis Tanner is well-documented and not subject to any particular dispute as to the identities of the individuals. Although some of the variations are merely stylistic, the fact that the individual was identified as Mr. Tanner or wrongly as William Tanner is difficult for me to understand in light of these scriptural injunctions requiring accuracy.

Elder Rudger Clawson explained the sacred obligation of keeping accurate temple records: 

In the early days of the Church, some baptisms for the dead that were not properly witnessed and recorded, were rejected of the Lord, and the work had to be done over again. We know that great care and attention is given to this matter today in our Temples, and that efficient help must be secured to do this. … Truly it is a great and marvelous work, and not the least important thing about it is that these ordinances are all carefully recorded in the books and are filed away in the archives of the Temple, to be brought forth in due time. From these records the people who have gone to that house will be judged. Nothing that is done in that Temple will be accepted of the Lord, except it is properly witnessed and recorded. (In Conference Report, Apr. 1900, pp. 43–44.)

Further quoting from the Introduction to Family History Teacher Manual: Religion 261, (2012), 16–21 from Brigham Young University:

This lesson reviews the basics for recording family history information and the importance of being as accurate and complete as possible in keeping records. The lesson is designed to also remind students that as they gather names of their ancestors, they are dealing with people who live as spirits in the postmortal spirit world. The Lord revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith (1805–44), “We without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18).

 One of the most obvious results of this lack of concern for accuracy is the rampant duplication of Temple work created by the inaccurate records. This has been a problem for a considerable period of time. Elder J. Thomas Fyans in speaking in General Conference in October of 1978 gave the following account:

It has become apparent that genealogical research efforts are being duplicated.To determine the extent to which such duplication exists, I took my genealogicalrecords to a professional research institute. They compared my records with theirname pool and determined that they already had ninety-five percent of myrecords in their file. That means that only five percent of my records are uniqueto me. Thirty-four other clients shared my ancestry. I was rather amazed withthis and wondered if such a high rate of duplication existed among the generalpopulation. At my request the institute took a sampling of clients from all parts ofthe United States, members of the Church and nonmembers. These names werecompared with records in their name pool, and it was determined that eightypercent were duplicates. Only twenty percent were unique. 

I found through a study made by another institution that I have at least 348 first,second, and third cousins, all of whom could be searching for the same pair ofsecond great-grandparents. 

From this you can see that duplication is tremendous in genealogical research. Itis for this basic reason that President Kimball has directed us that we shouldseek out our ancestors back four generations. After that we should work togetheras a Church through the records extraction program.

 With the tremendous tools we now have to research our ancestors, we are literally without excuse and failing to provide accurate records as a basis for Temple ordinances.

 

The Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collection on the Internet Archive

The sources I find on the Web are a never ending supply of surprises. One of the websites that is always a treasure trove is the Internet Archive (Archive.org). This website has a huge collection of items from dozens of public and university libraries all across the United States. Interestingly, the Internet Archive also has a substantial collection of items from the Harold B. Library at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah consisting of over 21,000 items from different collections.

Of particular interest to genealogists, is a collection of old maps. But the rest of the historical collections could be of help to genealogists who are searching for historical, cultural and other background information about their families. The Internet Archive is an endless source of fascinating documents, recordings, videos and everything in between in over 10 petabytes of stored documents. Just as a note to genealogists, the Internet Archive has a free complete digitized copy of the U.S. Federal Census records from 1790 to 1930.

Why do Mormons perform baptisms for the dead?

As a genealogist, I am in situations where the question in the blog title is frequently raised. Some of the people who ask this question are serious inquirers. Others are antagonistic to the principle altogether. It is important to realize that as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we have a valid, scripturally supported basis for our beliefs concerning this important ordinance. Quoting from the Frequently Asked Questions section of Mormon.org:

Jesus Himself, though without sin, was baptized to fulfill all righteousness and to show the way for all mankind (see Matthew 3:13-17; 2 Nephi 31:5-12). Thus, baptism is essential for salvation in the kingdom of God. We learn in the New Testament that baptisms for the dead were done during the Apostle Paul’s time (see 1 Corinthians 15:29). This practice has been restored with the establishment of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Prophet Joseph Smith first taught about the ordinance of baptism for the dead during a funeral sermon in August 1840. He read much of 1 Corinthians 15, including verse 29, and announced that the Lord would permit Church members to be baptized in behalf of their friends and relatives who had departed this life. He told them “the plan of salvation was calculated to save all who were willing to obey the requirements of the law of God” (Journal History of the Church, 15 Aug. 1840).

Section 128 of the Doctrine and Covenants is a letter from Joseph Smith containing instructions about the principle of baptism for the dead. The basis for the practice is explicitly set forth in Verse 8:

8 Now, the nature of this ordinance consists in the power of the priesthood, by the revelation of Jesus Christ, wherein it is granted that whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Or, in other words, taking a different view of the translation, whatsoever you record on earth shall be recorded in heaven, and whatsoever you do not record on earth shall not be recorded in heaven; for out of the books shall your dead be judged, according to their own works, whether they themselves have attended to the ordinances in their own propria persona, or by the means of their own agents, according to the ordinance which God has prepared for their salvation from before the foundation of the world, according to the records which they have kept concerning their dead.

Those who are members of the Church have more reasons to seek after our dead and do the work of genealogy or family history than those who do so out of an interest or hobby. As Joseph Smith said,

The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead. The apostle says, ‘They without us cannot be made perfect’; for it is necessary that the sealing power should be in our hands to seal our children and our dead for the fulness of the dispensation of times-a dispensation to meet the promises made by Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world for the salvation of man.
( History of the Church, 6:313. )

 This responsibility is not discharged by planning to do your genealogy sometime in the future or when you retire. I did not retire from work, I retired to work. I merely changed the emphasis of my full-time profession as an attorney, to take on another full-time profession, that of genealogist and teacher of genealogy. I see too many of my contemporaries, who are now at or past the retirement age, pursuing an "active adult lifestyle" focused on themselves and their desires and needs and not on taking their, now retired time, to do what they put off for so long. I haven't ever seen a time limit placed on our duty to seek after our dead or that we only need to do so when it is convenient or not interfering with our "active lifestyle."

I suggest that those who question the doctrines of the Church and claim that Mormons are destroying the cultural heritage by baptizing their ancestors, would deny those same ancestors, who are active, individual spirit children of our Father in Heaven, the same rights to determine their own beliefs and actions as those same people would so defend for themselves.

If you do not believe in an afterlife, then baptism for the dead would seem unnecessary. If you do believe in an afterlife, what gives you the right to determine how your loved ones who have passed on want to believe or what they want to do in that afterlife? If you are a believer, and also a member of the Church, why would you deny those same ancestors the right to be baptized if they wished to be? How is your failure to do your own genealogy and seek after your own dead any less of an issue than those outside the Church who would deny them the opportunity through stopping the practice of baptisms for the dead?

The Benefits of FamilySearch Indexing

I thought it would be a good idea to pass along some blog posts from the FamilySearch Consultants Blog since not everyone sees this blog. These posts give some excellent examples that can be used in classes or for your own motivation. If you are an Indexer, you may wish to subscribe to the blog posts. You can do this with a Reader program such as Feedly.com or any other Reader or News Aggregator program. Here are the links to the posts:

• Meet the Indexer
• Why I Index Part One
• Why I Index Part Two

If you haven't yet visited the new Indexing website, it is up and running but will continue to be enhanced over the next few months as FamilySearch works towards implementing online Indexing. Here is a screen shot of the new Indexing Web Site:

Pass This Along

One thing I have noticed is that relatively few of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have any particular contact with genealogical news concerning the Church's programs. I started this blog for the purpose of partially rectifying that issue and attempting to disseminate more information about the genealogical community within the Church. If you are reading this blog and enjoying what you read, please consider republishing links to this blog through Facebook, email and other online social networking programs. Thanks for all the kind comments and encouragement I have received in the past couple of months.

As usual, I very much appreciate comments especially suggestions for blog topics and questions.

Explanation added to Ordinances that "Need More Information"

In the past, when you saw this notice, you had to search around and try to figure out what was missing from your entries so that you could proceed with the ordinances. Now from an announcement in the FamilySearch Blog we have new resources:

When you have a deceased person in your Family Tree that doesn’t have enough information to qualify for temple ordinances, Family Tree now tells you what information is needed. More than 20 different situations can trigger the “Needs More Information” ordinance status to appear, which means it can be hard for a member to figure out what critical information is missing. Now you can get help knowing exactly what is missing and how you can update the record to qualify for temple ordinance work.

On the person’s summary card, hover your mouse over the ordinance status to see an explanation. If the status is “Needs More Information,” that message now tells you what information is needed:

Also, in the LDS Ordinances section of the person’s details, the information appears right beneath the ordinance status:

This is an area where I have gotten quite a few questions over the past months and this new addition will help to explain what is missing and how to go about resolving the issues. Thanks FamilySearch. 

How to add photos to Family Tree Photos -- the details you need to know

The FamilySearch.org Photos program has proved to be an extremely popular addition to the Family Tree program. However, in teaching classes about the program I find the same questions repeated. Here are some of the more common issues with my explanation of how the problems can be resolved.

1. The first issue is that of scanning or digitizing files. Here is a helpful website with scanning tips and a series of blog posts called Scanning 101 - The Basics. Scanning seems as simple as putting the photo on the scanner's screen and pushing a button, but it is really a lot more complicated.

2. One basic issue facing those who wish to upload their photos to FamilySearch.org is the format and file size of the images. Presently,the program is limited to a 5 MB file size and JPEG and PNG file formats. Since JPEGs are the most common file format created by scanners and digital cameras it is likely that most of the photos that are digitized for use with the program are already in that format. It is important to note that most archivists would recommend storing your photos in the TIF format to avoid loss of image quality if the photo is edited. You will then need to convert the TIFF files to JPEG files to upload to Family Tree. There are a number of free programs you can download from the Internet that will allow you to edit the photos without too much difficulty by changing the file format or the file size of the image. Two very commonly used programs are Google's Picasa and Irfanview.com. There are dozens of other programs that could be used.

3. The next issue is that of editing or manipulating the photo. I am of the strong opinion that the photos used for genealogical/historical purposes should not be edited. Most of the editing that I see on the Photos program involves cropping the photo to show just one individual in a group picture. By doing this, the user destroys the context of the photo and any relationships that may be indicated by the people depicted. I realize that there is absolutely no way to stop this from happening but I think that it is extremely important that the entire original photograph be uploaded. The purpose of the tagging function of the Photos program is partly to identify individuals in a group. Why have this feature if the users are going to crop the photos to eliminate the group?

Another tendency is for people to use the editing functions of the photo-manipulation programs to change the content of the photo in some way, usually to rectify assumed defects in the original photograph. Once again, from an archivist standpoint, it is important to preserve an accurate and unedited copy of the original. I have written about this issue in previous posts and probably will in the future again and again.

4. What if your photos are in an album? If the photos can be removed, it is a good idea to remove them from the albums before you begin scanning, if this can be accomplished without damaging the photos. If the photos are permanently mounted (glued) to the album pages, I suggest scanning the entire page as one image and then copying out the individual photos one at a time by cropping to the individual image and then saving the cropped image with a different name than the entire page. Here is a copy of a scanned album page:

In this particular case, the photos were glued down and there was no reason to "save" the album as such. So we cut the photos out of album individually. Fortunately, the photos were only on one side of the pages. The mounts were also permanently glued to the photos. Here is an example of the final scan of a photo from the album with the mounts clearly visible and still stuck to the photo:

The image was scanned as a TIFF file at 400 dpi and then converted to a JPEG when it was uploaded for this blog post. The TIFF image was 138.5 MBs and the JPEG image was 1.4 MBs. I happened to use Adobe Lightroom for the conversion, but you could use the programs I mentioned above or any others that accomplish the same size reduction.

To be continued...