What is our responsibility for ensuring our relatives' temple work is completed?

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Is there anyone on this board that can provide a reasonably official opinion of what we are to do with ordinances we cannot personally complete now that anyone can complete any ordinance that has been shared with the temple? Exactly what is our responsibility for ensuring that our relatives have their work completed?

A couple of years ago my wife and I started a project to make sure none of her relatives from the island of Stord, Norway, are missing from Family Tree. I provide the research. She provides the encouragement, the opportunity, and a listening ear.

To do this I started at the beginning of the parish register for the area that starts in 1878 and runs through 1913. The old extraction program only went up to 1877 in this area. Starting with births I am taking each record in turn and looking for it in Family Tree, I would guess less than 10 percent of them are, and adding them if they are not.

I then use the Stord Bygdebok, census records, the other parish record books, My Heritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch’s historical record databases for birth and marriages for Norway to add and complete information as needed for their parents, siblings, grandparents, and their parents’ siblings and to find and merge in all the duplicates from the extraction program and other users. Sometimes a completely new extended family is added to Family Tree. Sometimes I end up doing fifty to a hundred merges to fully combine fragments of a family scattered in Family Tree. Sources from the parish records are added to all of these people.

The funnest part of this, I have to say, is when I find duplicates in the United States for someone in a family where it is apparent that the descendants of the person got totally stuck and gave up extending their lines across the ocean. On these I try to do a particularly thorough job adding all census records and immigration records. At times this has added up to six generations to their lines.

The reason we started in this area is because Stord has had quite a stable population through the centuries and everyone is related to everyone else, making it highly likely that the people in this parish register will be related to her.

Here is a typical page. I have marked my wife’s relationship to each child:



Out of these 32 people, she is related to 28 of them.

I completed this page in October 2018. Currently out of those 28:

7 have ordinance that can be reserved.
4 have all ordinances “In Progress.”
8 have all ordinances shared with the temple.

Only 9 have all their ordinances completed. A few of these were from before we started this project.

It is great to see that three quarters of them have been taken up by other people and are getting completed.

This is just one page of the 130 pages of births in this parish register.

Since my wife has enough names on her temple reservation list from her direct ancestors, her great-whatever aunts and uncles and their spouses to keep us busy in the temple, we have not been reserving any of the extra names but rather leaving them available for other of their relatives to find, as has been occurring. We have not been sharing these with the temple since that would have blocked those other relatives from completing them. It has been interesting to see that as these families intertwine so that I come back to families I have worked on before from another direction, that of the green icons that have been picked up by other people, about half have been kept by those people to complete themselves and the remainder have been immediately shared with the temple when found.

This should be sufficient background to return to the question at hand:

What is my wife’s responsibility towards these 28 relatives she now knows about as far as ensuring their ordinances are completed?

The nine whose ordinances are complete she clearly has no further responsibility for.

The four who have had the responsibility taken on by others related to them likewise are no longer her responsibility.

The eight whose ordinances are shared with the temple will have their ordinances done sooner or later so one could also state that her responsibility is complete.

But what about the seven who are ready to be requested? Is it enough that they are in the tree so that someone else might find them someday? Are they no longer her concern? Ordinances Ready might find them for someone someday if the right person checks but only if there are no individuals in that person’s lines that are shared with the temple since Ordinances Ready checks first for people from our personal list, then our shared list, then the general shared list for those with a relationship to us, and only then for an unreserved relative with a green-but-not-shared icon status.

Is it now the recommendation that she share with the temple every relative we finish researching who needs ordinances since this no longer blocks others from finding and completing these ordinances?

For the twenty two pages I have completed in the parish register, assuming the statistics hold on average, that would mean that over the next few days my wife could share 154 individuals from these pages with the temple and any siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles that still need ordinances which would increase this number substantially. Should they be put in line so that it is assured their ordinances are done? Or left as they are on the assumption that some day, maybe not until after every other shared with the temple ordinance is done, someone will eventually find them?

LegacyUser

JimGreene said: Gordon, I am not sure I am the authority you want, but I may be as much authority as you get on this forum. I do know what is planned, and I do know some of the brethren's thoughts on this work. What is your responsibility for ensuring your relatives work gets done?  Obviously, you cannot do the work personally for every relative you find. But finding them and documenting them in the tree is the hard part, and you are doing the hard part.  Once they are there and have a green temple associated with them you can feel satisfied. Granted not as satisfied as when the work is actually performed, but satisfied that they are found, identified and documented.  Leaving them in that state does mean that they will eventually have the work done, the further back in time they existed, the more currently living descendants, the larger the number of people who will be searching the tree for relatives.  Any way you look at it time is required. The best solution is to have a family group defined in FamilySearch, of relatives who are wanting to help do the work. Then sharing those names to that group takes away the need for those family members to have to search more than that one easy spot (unless the family list is empty). I can tell you that we are working on the family group reservation list, I just cannot tell you when it will be ready, but it is in the active work column.  When that feature comes out I think you will feel much better about completing your responsibility to your relatives, correct?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Given the sacred and personal nature of the work, I believe that this is up to the individual, as to what they do with respect to temple attendance, researching their families, helping others, indexing, and so on.

I had a cousin who spent her days in the Salt Lake temple performing the vicarious ordinances for her (and my) relatives. The temple staff asked her to become a temple worker, but she declined, telling them she felt it was more important to get the ordinances completed. She was older and would walk each morning down from her home in the Avenues to the temple, spend the day, and then walk back to her home. She was dedicated and I am sure she is blessed for her work.

LegacyUser

Denise Marie Sorensen said: From your comments, it seems that best practice now is not to share names with the Temple. Is that correct?

I am a convert to the Church, however I am the ONLY member of the church in my extended family. None of my extended family cares about family history or the Church. I have some very unique family ancestry, and as the brother stated above, spend much time researching and documenting. The Family Group feature, sounds like a great feature to share, however, that would not work in my circumstance. I'm sure there are others that may have the same concerns.

I feel a sacred responsibility to ensure my ancestors temple work is completed. As such, I do share them with the Temple on the Temple reservation list. On the list, I know in some amount of time, their work will be completed. Being left "out in limbo" waiting for someone to select them on Ordinances Ready does not guarantee the work being completed in this lifetime.

LegacyUser

JimGreene said: I am not sure there is a desire to define a best practice when it comes to sacred work. I can tell you that in our planning and design we have designed Ordinance Ready to go through the tree and find the green temples, whether shared or not, for people who are ready to go to the temple, at least within the next 90-days. It will look for ones with family ties first, and if none are found it will do the same as the temple list-- share one that is not related to you, starting with the ones that are the oldest. So you see, we have a way to ensure that the work gets done even for those who don't have relatives that are members of the church. Elder Anderson at RootsTech a couple years back said that we should reserve as many names as we would do. Accordingly we have designed and implemented a system that does not maximize an experience of hunting green temples and submitting them to the temple list, rather, a process of finding, documenting, verifying and harvesting what we can consume, and leaving the rest for the gleaners and for Ordinance Ready.  Sharing the breadth and depth of the blessings of doing temple and family history work, not just the blessings from performing the ordinances.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Denise, my wife and I have decided to stick with our original decision. She is in a similar situation to you in that she joined the church when she was 16 and none of her family or close relatives are members of the church.

We reserve to personally complete or share with the temple:

1) All her direct line ancestors and all their spouses.
2) All her direct line ancestors' children and all their spouses.

When these are all complete, we will reserve more.

However, I am having a lot of fun researching out in all directions in her collateral lines and completing well sourced Family Tree entries for these people. We leave these for now as Ready. It has been fascinating to watch these entries be picked up by other people and completed.

This happens because you really don't have to go back very far to find that you have a lot more relatives than you ever though you had. We have had some interesting surprises. For example, I got into one section of my wife's relatives where all of the temple work was completed decades ago. We were wondering why, then discovered that her 3rd-great-grandmother's sister joined the church in Norway when she was 57 years old and a widow. Three of her sons also joined the church and the four of them emigrated to Utah in 1862. They have a lot of descendants to this day in Utah.

What you decide to do will be completely up to you and it sounds like we are not, as in so many things in the gospel, going to get hard and fast guidelines, just enough principles for us to be able to govern ourselves. We are being counseled more clearly than ever, however, on what not to do, in that we are being asked to not reserve and keep more ordinances than we are able to do within a few months. In other words, we are not to reserve so many ordinances for our personal reservation lists that it would take us two hundred years to complete them.

My personal opinion, which counts for nothing, is that you decide where to draw a line between leaving as Ready and Reserving And Sharing with the temple based on closeness of relationship (Share all 3rd cousins? Leave all 4th cousins?) then make exceptions as you see fit.

LegacyUser

TManning said: Perhaps the answer also depends on the quantity and quality of the source records available and how thoroughly they allow the families to be connected. The area of the world I am researching has fairly poor connectibility. I cannot tell for sure if my great great grandmother had a brother because the names of the mothers were not recorded on marriage records. No wills, land records or censuses exist and the church and civil records do not exist back any further.
I was also informed that if I changed an existing record in family search, the person's temple work would not be completed automatically by the temple, even though it had been started as part of an extraction project. Since the only way I can research a name is to merge the duplicate parent records caused by the extraction process and attach sources, I always submit to the temple and share any names I work on.
Does this mean non-relatives will be doing the work? Only if no one else connects to these people prior to the 4 years it was taking for a name to complete at the temple. I am not really happy about this but know of no way around it. Almost no one has contacted me to request that I release a name to them and as far as I can tell, not one person in my temple list has been picked up by a relative through ordinance ready.
So at least I know these names are being completed and the work I have done has better documented these people, allowing better hints to be offered for researchers coming in the future. And since I am only working with the sources available on family search, which comprise maybe 20% of the total available names for this area, that leaves maybe 80% of the people in this area available for close family members to do their temple work. Not the ideal, but the only one I could figure out that allowed me to feel I was meeting my obligations to my ancestors.