What I Wish Everyone in the Church Knew About Family History

Ben Baker

My Background

• Nearly 5 years as a Software Engineer at FamilySearch

• Currently work on Family Tree, but try to use all our products

• Have previously given several presentations going into more detail on several similar topics. To view/download these presentations go to http://www.slideshare.net/bakers84.

3 Great Myths of Family History

My genealogy is done / There is nothing for me to do

Doing Family History is too hard and time consuming

Family History is for old people

Purpose of FamilySearch

The purpose of the Family History

Department is to help Church members

fulfill their divinely appointed

responsibility to discover their families

and submit their names for temple

ordinances

Key Indicator Reports

Ask your• Family history consultant(s)• High priest group leader• Bishop• Stake presidentabout this report for your stake/ward.

Share Your Knowledge

As shown from the purpose statement and key indicator report, increasing participation among all members is paramount.

Share what you know with:• Your family, from immediate family to distant cousins

• Your friends, from ward members to those not of our faith

Why Youth Are Needed

Elder Neal L. Anderson challenged the youth at RootsTech 2014 “to set a personal goal to help prepare as many names

for the temple as baptisms you perform in the temple.” https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/temple-challenge

Why?

Because temples shouldn’t have to provide nameswhen your own family needs your help and

Experiencing “both halves” of the blessing builds faith

NO MORE TEMPLE WELFARE!

Critical Paradigm To Understand – Part 1

Where you can help the most1. Find your relatives in indexed records and link

them to persons in Family Tree2. Upload photos, stories and documents of your

relatives and link them to persons in Family Tree3. Help index historical records4. Clean up data in Family Tree5. Reserve temple ordinances for your family

Family Tree

Digitized Images

Indexed Records

Historical Records (Microfilm and

original documents)

Living Memory

Photos, Stories, Documents, Audio

Completed LDS Temple

Ordinances

Critical Paradigm To Understand – Part 2

The best way

to find people who need LDS temple work is to find people who are NOT in the tree yet

The best way

to find people not in the tree yet is

to find them in a historical record with someone who is already in the tree

Embrace Change

Embrace change, don’t be afraid of it

Click on new things to see what they do

I don’t think you can mess up anything in a single click, but be sure to read warnings.

Keep up to Date

Read the FamilySearch blog at https://familysearch.org/blog/en/ for updates on new features and other happenings.

Subscribe to the blog via RSSGoogle “how to subscribe to an rss feed” for helps – I use Outlook and feedly

Use the categories and search for information you’re most interested in

Family Tree is “Our Tree”

• Freely available to anyone worldwide• Reduces duplication of effort• Increases collaboration to arrive at the best

information• Information added outlives contributors• Link person profiles to additional information• More on this topic in my presentation “Finding ‘My

Tree’ Within FamilySearch Family Tree’s ‘Our Tree’” on SlideShare

We can all go further faster by working together

Record Hints are Awesome!

• Searches indexed records for you

• Will find records based on all information, including maiden and married names

• Often overcomes errors in records

• Only presents high confidence matches

• 4x increase in sources attached since rollout

Congratulations!

You have just found someone in a record that is not in the tree

Record Hints in the Descendancy View

Search Records Link

• Starting point

• Search section for how to refine

Starting Point for Further Refined Searches

Example Search Refinement

Use Other “Tree” Views

Descendancy View

Fan Chart View

Portrait Pedigree View

Puzzilla.org Can Also Help Find Areas To Work

View Memories of Your Relatives

Scope of Interest

Internal term used to define those persons who will show up in this section of memories and

also in temple opportunities.

The system is showing you persons four generations above you along with their spouses,

children and grandchildren.

Make Your E-mail Public

Use Family History Resources on lds.org

View the main lds.org page for family history at http://www.lds.org/topics/family-history

Get Help With Family History Callings

For training and resources for Family History callings go to http://www.lds.org/callings/temple-and-family-history

Share The “Why” of Family History With Those Not of Our Faith

Share http://mormon.org/family-history with others

Other Useful Tips• Use more than one tab when doing work to keep context

more easily. Using your mouse to middle click will open something in new tab

• Use https://beta.familysearch.org to try out things and see previews of coming features

• There is now a site map for familysearch.org at https://familysearch.org/site-map. I gave a presentation at the 2013 conference that while getting out of date is also a decent site map. See http://www.slideshare.net/bakers84/a-whirlwind-tour-of-family-search-resources-syllabus and http://www.slideshare.net/bakers84/a-whirlwind-tour-of-family-search-resources-presentation for the list of URLs and presentation.

• Many more than time allows

3 Great Myths of Family History

My genealogy is done / There is nothing for me to do

Doing Family History is too hard and time consuming

Family History is for old people

© 2014 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved

Thank You!

Images Used

• Slide 5 – Screenshot from Family History Department Priesthood Key Indicator report

• Slides 11, 13-26, 28, 30-32 – Screenshots taken from https://familysearch.org

• Slide 27 – Screenshot taken from https://puzzilla.org

• Slide 33-34 – Screenshots taken from http://lds.org

• Slide 35 – Screenshot taken from http://mormon.org