What are the family history callings?

You might be surprised to learn what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers to be family history callings. Here is the list from the LDS.org website in the Family History Callings section.

• Family History Consultant
• NEW-High Priest Group Leaders
• Stake Indexing Director
• NEW-Family History Center Director
• Area Family History Adviser
• FamilySearch Support Missionary
• Stake and Ward Leaders

Here is a short summary of the duties of each of these callings taken from The Leader's Guide to Temple and Family History: To Turn the Hearts.

Family History Consultant

Consultants are skilled teachers who work and communicate well with others. While consultants need not be experts in family history research, they should be comfortable using the resources at FamilySearch.org and helping others use them. These FamilySearch resources include family pedigrees, historical records, and the FamilySearch Family history consultants are essential to successful family history work. They help individuals and families experience the joy of doing family history. The high priests group leader provides consultants with direction and assignments.Youth can be called to serve as consultants when their technology skills can be helpful in assisting others.  (Page 20).

High Priest Group Leader

The high priests group leader coordinates the ward council’s efforts to encourage temple and family history work in the ward. He is accountable to the bishop for the results of these efforts. He also directs the work of family history consultants. He receives assistance and training from the high councilor assigned to temple and family history work. (Page 18).

Stake Indexing Director

The stake presidency, in consultation with the high councilor, recommends an individual to be called as the stake indexing director. Assistant directors may also be called. The director trains and supports members in their indexing efforts, coordinates members’ efforts, and is given rights to the indexing program’s reports in order to keep track of the stake’s participation. The director provides regular updates on the stake indexing effort to the high councilor. (See page 9).

Family History Center Director

Family history centers are staffed by individuals who have specific skills in teaching, doing family history research, and using FamilySearch technology. Staff members include: Family history center director and assistant directors, if needed. Directors and assistant directors are recommended to serve by the stake presidency and are approved by the stake presidency and the high council. The stake presidency may ask the assigned high councilor for a recommendation. (See Page 10).

Area Family History Adviser

Area family history advisers do the following:

• Consult with Area Seventies, stake presidencies, and high councilors on how family history can serve as a resource to help achieve overall goals for those whom they serve.
• Provide training in temple and family history to stake leaders and others within stakes and wards.
• Provide information to area leaders on the Church’s direction and plans for family history work.
• Inform the Family History Department about family history needs and activities within the area and its stakes. Area family history advisers partner with the department to meet those needs. 

Area family history advisers are called to assist and train leaders and others in their family history efforts. They work with the Family History Department to meet the area’s family history needs.

FamilySearch Support Missionary

This opportunity for young and old alike allows mission service from home, part-time, with a flexible schedule. It provides a chance to make new friends and learn more about advancements in family history work. If you are unable to serve a full-time mission due to health challenges or other issues, this may be a good alternative for you. LDS.org

Stake and Ward Leaders
The duties of the Stake and Ward leaders are set forth in the The Leader's Guide to Temple and Family History: To Turn the Hearts.

Record Hints vs Searching on Your Own

One of the fastest changing technologies that direct impacts family history research is the implementation of automatic or semi-automatic, integrated search programs. To write such program that will function effectively, it is a prerequisite to have available an extensive database of indexed, source records. Essentially, you can't afford to plumb a dry well. Unless you have a large enough base of records to search, developing search programs is pointless. Let me illustrate the concept of developing such a system starting with a basic manual search.

Let's suppose I collect ten business cards from contacts at a convention. I can put those cards on my desk in a pile and if I need to contact one of the people whose card is in the stack, I can find the card without too much trouble. What if the number increases exponentially? Now I have 100 cards on my desk. About this this time I begin to think of ways to "organize" the cards so that I can efficiently find one I am looking for so I start putting the cards in alphabetical order. This might work, even if the number of cards increases exponentially. If the cards were organized alphanumerically, then I could still use the stack to locate one card. This assumes, of course, that I know the name or company of the person I am looking for and that a card for the person or company exists in the pile of cards.

These same considerations would apply if we used an example of searching for an ancestor. If I have ten records to search, the process is trivial. If I have ten thousand records to search, the process might be overwhelming. Obviously genealogists are not the only people who want to search large databases. A paper telephone book, even a very large one, is an efficient way to organize a large number of people and make finding any one of them possible in a relatively short time. In the phone book example the people subscribed to the telephone company in a somewhat random order. But their listings in the phone book were arranged alphanumerically and that made them accessible to a search.

This same level of organization applies to genealogical records. If I have ten thousand records and I organize them in alphanumeric order, theoretically I can find the one name I am searching for. If I am doing this manually, searching 10,000 records will be about the same level of difficulty as searching through 100 records assuming they are sorted alphanumerically. How is genealogical research different than looking for a name in a phone book or other alphanumeric list? In making searches for genealogical information, we are not always aware of the names, dates or places recorded in the records we are searching. In many cases we make assumptions about the information we are searching for that is inaccurate or completely wrong in that our search terms are not the same as those in the historical records. For example I may be searching for an ancestor named John Smith born in 1800 but the name of my ancestor was actually Albert Smith and he was born in 1790. This lack of correspondence between what we are searching for and what is recorded in the historical records renders even an alphanumeric list useless.

If the genealogical record is an index then the process is similar. But if you think about it, a phonebook is unidirectional. You can look for a name (assuming you know it) but you cannot do the opposite; look for a telephone number.

These examples point out a basic limitation of all searches: any accurate search depends on the researcher's knowledge. If I know the person's name and need to know a telephone number, I can find that easily. But in order for me to manually find the name of a person with a known telephone number, I need to have a list organized by telephone number. In either case, I need to know either the name or the telephone number to use a paper-based directory. The issue of needing some basic information also applies to indexes created on a computer. As long as any additional search terms or segregated classes of information are indexed in some definable order, a manual search will be able to find information eventually that is associated with the entries in that particular field. For example, if we add a date field to our telephone record and the database is sorted by date, we can use a known date to find a record. Likewise, if we have a name, date and place for an ancestor that corresponds to the same information in an historical record, we may eventually find the record. The main limitation is and always has been the number of records to be searched.

To summarize, when I search for genealogical information, I am essentially trying to match what I think I know to information I hope is contained in some historical record. I am limited by the time and effort it takes to make such a search. If the records are organized in some way, alphanumerically or by date or by place or whatever, my search may be more efficient. For example, if I am searching church parish registers in which the information was entered chronologically and I know the name of the person I am searching for and an approximate date, I can efficiently go through a section of the records and determine if the person I am searching for is contained in the record.

In this case, matching what I already know, the ancestor's name etc. to a record may help me discover information I do not know. Using the parish register as an example, I may find the names of my ancestor's parents in a christening record.

In all these cases, a successful search depends on starting with information that we know before we begin the search; hence, the commonly used genealogical maxim to start searching from what you already know. See the following list of references to starting with what you know.

Dowell, David R. Crash Course in Genealogy. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

Helm, Matthew L., and April Leigh Helm. Genealogy Online For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

McGinnis, Carol. Michigan Genealogy: Sources & Resources. Genealogical Publishing Com, 2005.

“Start With What You Know.” Daughters of the American Revolution. Accessed January 18, 2016. http://www.dar.org/national-society/genealogy/start-what-you-know.

Here we depart from manual searches to the world of computers. A computer program can be written to take a random list of names, telephone numbers any any number of additional fields, that will find or match the contents of any field. The order of the database corpus can be entirely random and given the speed of the current computers, a very large list of multiple fields can be searched in a very short time. However, for a computer program to search paper records, the information must be extracted into a searchable format. For some types of printed documents that can be done by even more sophisticated programs called optical character recognition programs. Today there are vast databases of books, newspapers and other printed documents that can be searched by computer programs for information that matches the researcher's search terms. For example, I can find the name of an ancestor in a collection of millions of pages of newspapers. In this case my success in finding my ancestor's name will depend on my knowing how his name might have been recorded in the historical record.

In all my examples so far errors can occur that prevent me from finding the information if the historical text is unreadable for any reason or if the information I am searching for is missing from the historical record.

Now let's move on to a more complex example involving handwritten documents. Many genealogically significant records contain names, dates and places as well as other useful information. Let's further suppose that we are dealing with a collection of paper records that have multiple significant "fields" or specific classes of information. In this case, since there are currently no adequate handwriting recognition programs for genealogically important documents, the extraction of the information must still be done by human effort. We call this process "indexing." However, in effect, we are not indexing anything, we are merely transferring information from a handwritten format into a text format that can be "recognized" by a computer program. The "indexed" records are not organized in any way by the indexer, but the individual items of information, i.e. names, dates etc., are entered into fields that can be searched by a computer program.

It should be obvious that the ability of a researcher to use the "indexed" information depends entirely on the accuracy of the extraction operation. Only when the information is in a computer usable format, such as a text file of some sort, can a computer program can try to match what is entered by the researcher with what has been produced by the indexers (read extractors).

The entry of the search terms can be done manually by the researcher or another program can be written to use information already present in a family tree or other database. Here we are. As genealogists we are now either entering in our own search terms into a program that will then search the extracted (indexed) database or we are relying on a program written to automatically match information already present in the database (family tree). Once again, in both instances the effectiveness of the search depends on the accuracy of the information supplied either manually or by a program. As has been said for a long time in computer circles, "garbage in - garbage out."

In both cases, using a manually entered set of search terms and relying on a computer program that matches existing information with information extracted from historical records or documents, what we are hoping to find is additional information about our ancestors that we did not know previous to the search. Ultimately, we hope to identify additional individual ancestors. Here we come to the basic limitation of the automated search programs: they can only supply information about people already present in the database (family tree or whatever). It is only through the fact that the records may incidentally contain information about other ancestors (or relatives) that are not already present.

The automatic search programs can be made to be quite sophisticated. They can be programmed to search for alternate names, name variants, approximate dates and places that are nearby to the search terms present either entered by the researcher or already in the database.

One of the consequences of searching manually is that the search programs (commonly called search engines) will produce multiple responses to a search. Ideally any search should produce all and only all of the records pertinent to a particular set of search terms. Automated search technologies attempt to do this by suggesting "record hints" rather than record matches. In every case the so-called "record hint" must be carefully evaluated by the researcher to assure that the person suggested matches the one already in the database.

Here we come to the great flaw in both manual and automated, computer assisted searches. Both rely entirely on the accuracy of the records already present in the researcher's mind or database. Like I pointed out previously, if I am searching for "John Smith" I will find "John Smith" even if I am searching for the wrong name. In practice this occurs most frequently in the phenomena we call "same name = same person." An equally as common issue in research is failing to identify the place an event occurred accurately or consistently. Some programs try to compensate for this problem by encouraging "standardized" place names but the standardized place name may actually be inaccurate in that it fails to match the place as recorded in a historical record.

This whole subject is extremely complicated. Genealogical researchers today are in the midst of a huge transition moving from repetitious and routine searches to depending on automated search programs. Those programs will not do our research for us. We cannot assume that the results are accurate, any more than we can rely on our own efforts absent our consistent production of accurate information. Whether manual or automated, research into the unknown always relies on the accuracy of what we think we already know.

The Family History Technology Workshop

Every year for the last 15 years, Brigham Young University holds a Family History Technology Workshop. This year's Workshop is scheduled the day before the Innovators Summit at RootsTech 2016. As usual, the Workshop is held at the Conference Center (Harmon Building) on the BYU campus. Here is the address and phone number: 770 East University Parkway Provo, Utah 84602 (801) 422-4853. Provo is south of Salt Lake City and the exact distance according to Google Maps from BYU to the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City is 44.3 miles. It can take up to two hours to make the trip by car, depending on traffic and weather.

This is one of those events that are very focused. If you are interested in software development for the genealogical community, you probably already know about the Workshop and are planning to attend. You can register on the website. Here is a description of the Workshop from the website:

The 2016 Family History Technology Workshop will bring together developers, researchers, technology professionals, and users to discuss the future of family history technology and genealogical research. The workshop will feature developer sessions, lightning talks, technical presentations, panels, and demos to showcase emerging and future technologies.

In the past, the Workshop has attracted a few people who apparently did not know the purpose of the Workshop and were challenged by its focus on very technical issues. But for those who are active in this area, the Workshop is where the real technical aspects of developing software and new technology are discussed. Registration for the Workshop includes a light breakfast, lunch and snacks.

I will be attending the conference and giving one of the Lightning Talks.

My RootsTech 2016 Survival Strategy

RootsTech 2016 will be my sixth RootsTech Conference as a blogger. Of course there have been a huge number of changes over the years. This will be my second year's conference while living in Utah and my wife and I have been talking about the logistics of attending the conference for sometime now. We live some distance from Salt Lake City and depending on traffic and/or the weather it can take more than two hours to make the trip. If we drive, rather than take the train, we also have to consider parking. Either way, we end up walking a lot. The FrontRunner train is a viable alternative during the week, but the schedule on Saturday from Provo would get us there too late for the Opening Keynote. So we needed to take that into consideration.

We have been having a series of storms this past week or so and the storms seem to be continuing into the immediate future. If it snows during the Conference, then the traffic becomes a huge factor in commuting. We will likely stay with family in Salt Lake for the duration of the Conference to avoid the trip. It is really nice to have that option.

The Conference is held in the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City and blocks in Salt Lake are about 6 to a mile. The Salt Palace is about two blocks long from north to south. So in course of walking to the Salt Palace and then walking around inside, you can put on many miles. I will have a pedometer app on my iPhone this year and so I will report the number of miles I walk every day just for interest sake.

Food is not an issue at RootsTech. The Salt Palace is located right across the street from the huge City Creek Center with over 30 restaurants within a block or two. But if the attendance last year is any indication, especially on Saturday, the Conference will be very crowded. If you want to attend a particular class, I suggest that you arrive as early as possible. I hear a lot of comments about classes being full to overflowing. The Conference has a lot of activities each day that compete with classes. I usually try to go to a few classes but for the last few years, I have seldom made more than one or two. I look at RootsTech more as an opportunity to keep in touch with other bloggers and genealogists, developers and vendors.

If you aren't a regular conference attendee, I suggest you seriously consider your footwear. I have purchased different shoes at least twice in anticipation of all the walking at RootsTech. I would further suggest discarding fashion for comfort. Wear comfortable shoes and clothes. Of course, if you are employed or have to do anything formal like present, you need to dress appropriately. It is often very cold in Salt Lake and the temperatures could be in lower teens. (well below 0 degrees Centigrade) Coats are an issue. You will need warm clothes but then you need to take into account that you will have to carry everything around with you each day. We purchased very warm parkas that fold up into a compact package that makes it possible to reduce the volume of the coats considerably. I also carry a large backpack for my computer and to store any papers or other items from the Conference.

Those of us writing during the conference have to consider the needs of our electronic devices. Trying to use WiFi at the Conference has always turned out to be a challenge. As an Ambassador, the Media Hub has connections for computers. If you are using an iPad or whatever rather than a traditional laptop, you have to consider bringing a way to charge your device and connect to the Internet. If you stay in a nearby hotel, you may have WiFi during the time you are in your room, but I have had spotty service in the past in some venues.

Most importantly, take time to rest, eat and drink enough water. It is easy to get dehydrated. There is a lot to see in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah including the Family History Library. But remember that the entire first floor of the Library is under construction. I am not sure how far along the construction will be by Conference time, but the library is usually congested during the Conference.

Be sure and say hello if you see me. The thing about conferences that I enjoy the most is talking to people and catching up with my friends from around the world. Don't worry if I look busy. I am always busy. The Media Hub is in the middle of the Exhibit Floor and since I write a lot during the Conference, I am frequently parked there typing away. Say hello anyway.

Update on the FamilySearch App Gallery

I started poking around in the FamilySearch.org App Gallery and found several of the apps were no longer linked to a website. Apparently, FamilySearch has yet to weed out the apps, such as Family Tree Maker from Ancestry.com and StoryPress that are no longer available. It is not unusual for apps (or previously programs) to go out of production. I haven't kept a running list of the apps on the website, but it appears that the total number is staying about the same. There are presently 113 apps listed up from the last time I focused on the number when it was 111 apps but with the ones that are no longer functioning, the number has actually gone down.

When the App Gallery first comes up, it shows some "New and Noteworthy" apps. Most of the ones shown are not new and some of the new ones are not shown either. It looks like the App Gallery itself needs some attention. I may be mistaken due to the fact that I haven' t looked at the App Gallery for a while.

That said, there is one "new" (at least new to me) app. It is called Place Research by FamilySearch. Here is a screen shot of the app's page.

This is an app or program, but it is really a link to the Place Research section of the FamilySearch.org website I have written about recently. Here is a screenshot of the program.

It is probably a good idea to list some of these website functions or sections as apps since there does not seem to be an obvious link to them within the website itself. The "app" is described as follows:

As time progresses places are built, destroyed, renamed or conquered. As researchers track family histories across centuries, it becomes important to track the historical context of places as well. 

Place Research is a FamilySearch application which provides access to standardized information about locations. This information is used by several FamilySearch applications to assist researchers.

From time to time I will return to the App Gallery to highlight additional offerings. We are rapidly coming up on RootsTech 2016 and I expect we will have several new additions after the Conference.

Join the Famous People on the FamilySearch Family Tree

I guess I got started with this by looking at Relative Finder, but there is always another way to get people interested in the Family Tree and looking around. You have to remember that the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is open to the world so logically, it should have nearly every famous person who had any posterity. Here is my first example.

I suggest that you leave all of these entries alone and make no significant additions or edits unless you really are related to these people, but they are interesting to find. Here is another.

Here's one a little more obscure.

You can always go back a bit in time to find people you really appreciate.

I might as well complete this tour with another somewhat obscure person, but if you know me well, you can probably guess my reason for including three of these people.

Just in case you can't guess what I am doing here, I was going to give you one more clue that would help but he is not dead yet.

Just one last example.

That was going to be my last entry, but I couldn't resist at least one woman.

Examine Your FamilySearch Family Tree Entries

Is accuracy important in our work of seeking out our ancestors? I might think that this is an entirely rhetorical question, but what I have read and heard recently gives me pause to consider that the question might be real, at least to some members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is, however, no equivocation in the messages being sent from the leaders of the Church and the official publications including the scriptures. Here is a quote from the Introduction to Family History Student Manual on LDS.org. This particular quote is from the teachings of Elder John A. Widtsoe (1872-1952)

Elder John A. Widtsoe (1872–1952) taught that the keeping of accurate records serves a divine purpose and was affirmed by revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith: “Towards the end of Joseph’s life, a series of instructions were given the Prophet relative to the necessity of keeping records. It is on the basis of this revelation that the careful system of records is being followed in the temples. Every person is accounted for, huge volumes are stored, for the Latter-day Saints believe literally that out of the books men shall be judged. The Lord may have other means of knowing, but it is the right and orderly way for us” (The Message of the Doctrine and Covenants, ed. G. Homer Durham [1969], 161).

The practice of keeping accurate records increases the efficiency and accuracy of family history work. This begins with you in your own family history efforts.

One saying that was passed down to me from my own ancestors is this: "Anything worth doing is worth doing right." With respect to researching our family history, I think this saying applies to the work we do in assuring that the entries we put into the FamilySearch.org Family Tree should be as complete and accurate as possible. Historical research can only be as accurate as the available source records, but many of the entries in the Family Tree are without sources and have apparently never been even superficially examined for accuracy. This fact is now obvious because of the various icons that have been added to the program to warn about the need for more research and to notify users of data problems. Here is a screenshot of the various icons being used with the Family Tree program. This link is on the right side of the screen in the menu bar.

If you explore the information about your own family on the Family Tree, it will not take you long to find some of the red Data Problem icons. Here is an example.

In this case, the two warning messages are as follows:

But in many cases, the errors and omissions are much more subtle and harder to detect and the program does not find them. Some of these not-so-obvious errors can result in the user pursuing an unrelated family line when the error shows the wrong family line in the Family Tree.

This Morgan line above is an example of that issue. The individual Jacob Morgan (b. 1723, d. 1780) cannot be the father of the person shown as John Morgan (b. 1734, Deceased). If he were, he would have been only 11 years old when his first child was born.

The argument I have been hearing lately is that as long as the entries are in the Family Tree, the program shows the people's relationships and we know that the person existed and so it is entirely proper to do the Temple work because that degree of accuracy is not necessary. Following that line of reasoning, I could certainly go ahead and do the Temple work for the next generation of people attached to Jacob Morgan and in fact, there is a green Temple icon showing the availability of work to be done.

Am I related to Capt. Richard Morgan (b. 1700, d. 1763)? It is highly unlikely that I am. If I were following the rules for doing Temple ordinances, I would not be justified in doing the work for someone to whom I was not related. See the following from the Help Center article entitled, "Doing temple work for names gathered from a film or book:"

Names of nonrelated persons should not be submitted, including names of celebrities or famous people, or those gathered from unapproved extraction projects, such as Jewish Holocaust victims. For further information, see Handbook 2: Administering the Church [2010], 5.4.

Until I do some research and determine whether or not this person is a related to me, I should not be doing the Temple work. In this particular case, the Family Tree program will not allow the work to be done without further action. In this case resolution of possible duplicates.

If we examine the record for this person named "Capt. Richard Morgan" in the Family Tree, we will find that there is really no information at all.

Further, there are no sources listed for the approximate information given. But there is a possible duplicate.

Should I merge these two individuals merely because they have the same name when one of the entries is based on an estimate of when the person lived? As I keep going with this particular entry, I find that the information supplied when comparing the two individuals is inconclusive. But wait! I need to go back and determine if I am even related to either of the possible people.

Just for a note, I am really still doing research back with the family line several generations before these people are shown. Is it important that I do accurate research and determine the correct family lines? Here I am back to the first question in this blog post. I suppose each of us has to answer these questions for ourselves.  But as for me, I am going to follow my ancestral admonition: "Anything worth doing is worth doing right."