New Family Search needs to have a "Family Queue Tab" to share reserved Temple Ordinances names with

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George Speer said: New Family Search needs to have a "Family Queue Tab" to share reserved Temple Ordinances names with my siblings and children.

I'm the genealogist of the family. My family members don’t seem to have the desire, time or knowledge to do family research. They do however regularly attend the Temple to perform ordinances. In most cases they just do what’s available at the Temple. To do family names I have to print out a temple ordinances sheet and snail mail or email these sheets to them.

I would like to see in the future, a Family Queue Tab where I can control who can join the family queue, to do these reserved family name.

Bro. George D. Speer Sr.
genealogy (at) speer . org

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Mindy Flores said: G. Speer Thank you for the great suggestion. FamilySearch has this idea under consideration, keep up the good work!

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Gareth Taylor said: Fantastic idea, would help me a lot as my older brother has 'reserved' a lot of the family history so we can do the ordinances as a family, however he lives a few hundred miles away and getting the cards from him is not always easy.

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Mary Susan (Carlson) Scott said: One idea which has worked for me is to print out the Family Ordinance Request (FOR) for my own records. I then save each FOR in a special folder. I save each FOR by the date it was created. (At the end of the year, I put all the FORs in the same folder in my documents section. As the FORs are completed, I can also delete the saved FOR if desired.)

I then emailed the FOR as an email attachment to someone who wanted to do baptisms from my family file. In this case, I requested only the baptisms and confirmations for the particular FOR.

In minutes, my FOR was received via email in another state several hundred miles away. This is one option which would benefit families working together on the ordinances.

It also allows the main researcher to release only the ordinances which another person wants to do -- ie., endowments or sealings.

This idea was discussed on the family history consultant email list a few years ago and it has worked well for me.

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Michael W. McCormick, AG® said: This year there was a rumor that something for better sharing is being worked on, but I hope an employee will comment.

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Mark E. Gower said: I'm surprised that a great idea, like this one, has gone on "under consideration" for so long (almost 3 years). Perhaps a lot more transparency and collaboration with the patron users is needed to make Family Tree a World Class "Go-To" Place.

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George Speer said: I sent a letter to LDS Church Office Building, on September 28, 2010. Here is just a bit more of what I suggested:

Some people just need a little help. If they have access to a computer they could:
1.) Log into NFS
2.) Click; Family Queue
3.) Select name and work they would like to perform
4.) Print

At the Temple: After you scan your recommend at the security desk, your family queue will be activated and running in the background for a couple of hours.

In the Temple Recorders Office there will be an OTS “Ordinance Touch Screen Computer” that would be activated by scanning your Temple recommend.

What the patron will see is a pop-up screen. On this screen there would be series of boxes for the patron to touch:

Select one:
1.) Baptize
2.) Confirmation
3.) Initiatory
4.) Endowment
5.) Seal to Parents
6.) Seal to Spouse

The next pop-up screen is a number pad with a question:
Select the number of “Endowment” you would like to perform on this visit. Touch the number desired.

Next Pop-up: Print That’s it, your all done!

The OTS will print a barcode from a receipt paper spool. The patron can hand it to the recorder who then would print; pink, blue or yellow cards. Note: You could have the OTS print out what’s needed to perform the ordinance without further assistance. (This would be possible because “the main family researcher” would have the training/skills to check for duplicates, exec....)

This four step printing process should make it easy for our relatives who need a little help doing family names.

Bro. George D. Speer Sr.
genealogy (at) speer.org

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Mark E. Gower said: Too Much Hardware and Software to Maintain, very costly.

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Michael W. McCormick, AG® said: Like I said before, I heard earlier sometime in the past year that something is being done. Now I have found an actual employee on video talking about it.
http://broadcast.lds.org/eLearning/fh...
Go to "Product Roadmap for the next Six Months" and go to minute 15:40.
Jim Ericson, marketing for FamilySearch, only briefly mentions a goal to make it easier to share names among those who are in a position to do the work.

I know that some more things were suggested in other threads somewhere which I can't currently find.

Share names with ward or stake also. Perhaps have check boxes that say family, ward, and stake. Or maybe even better, when you click the share button make the user pick family, ward, stake, or temple. Have a little notice that says: "Sharing with a broader group will allow your names to be done more quickly. Those who pick up names at the temple will automatically get those names from the smallest group in which names are available for them."

I can click share with ward, but no one from my ward goes that week. My brother-in-law goes to the temple (who is in a different ward) and because he is in the family grouping he gets the name I reserved under the ward option. It would be a tiered system, including all levels below with priority to lower levels upon pick-up. Make sense?

This is just one possible implementation that I think would fill several needs.

Touch screen options would be nice, but the same bar code scanners that recorders offices use for recording names could be programmed to scan recommend barcodes.

For example, you could simply tell the worker that you want 1 female and 1 male endowment and they could scan your barcode and enter your choice. Then the names in your closest preference (family, ward, stake) come out the printer.

This would allow for it all to be done with no new equipment. There would probably be a lot of back end database work and software work to make the system, but it would be worth it.

FamilySearch has an algorithm to find relatives that is currently used to find temple opportunities. This same kind of algorithm could extend in the background databases to find and identify (in the background--not visible) who the siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and the spouses of all those listed are. This might be complex, but I believe the computer could determine within seconds the family for whoever's barcode is scanned and then put out the names for the closest relation. This way you'd get the temple names that were shared by your closest relative without having to specify exact relatives to share with etc. Although it would be nice to be able to select an exact relative you want to share a name with that only they or a specified group can pick up. It is all possible, and only requires some invisible stuff that techies do to the algorithms and databases and maybe the website interface to have just a couple new buttons.

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Michael W. McCormick, AG® said: On a different note, but using the same tools...

I made a suggestion to FamilySearch that they allow us to skip the printing of a barcode paper and simply have them scan our recommend to retrieve our most recent F.O.R. (Family Ordinance Request) at the temple.

The other post about this whole sharing via barcode thing I mentioned is here: https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...
It is more of just a few comments somewhat off-topic in the larger thread.

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epeery said: Love, love, love this idea! I have over 200 names reserved, and want to share with my 10+ immediate family and 50+ extended family. I hope they implement this idea.

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Andy E. Wold said: Getting cards from him is quite simple. Have him print the ordinance request to a PDF file and email it to you. You can then take it to the temple and have them scan its Barcode and print out the cards.

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Gareth Taylor said: Im being kind - in reality his attention to sharing the names is slow at best, in reality, he has reserved the names and as a result, the work has stopped.

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Joy Elaine Vester said: This sounds hard to program but I am not tech savy. But the idea of having a pool of my reserved names that any of my children could access and print out the FOR and go to the temple sounds wonderful as they all live in different states and my husband and I are in Chile on a mission.

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L. Wayne Andrews said: Having not seen your suggestion, I submitted a similar idea. Let's hope they do it!

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Sylvía Hilmarsdóttir said: Great idea!

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Tom Huber said: This is a very old discussion.

The option of sharing / assigning names to others has existed for a number of years. I've used it with relatives and many who receive requests to share a name with the person making the request, fulfill the request gladly.

Now, the new Ordinance Ready system also takes care of this situation nicely without allowing patrons to hoard proxy ordinances and/or hoping that a person who has the temple-shared proxy ordinances will share them with the person making the request.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: im sorry but i personally dont see this situati9on as having been resolved. I already made a comment in another thread about this a couple weeks ago but i will try and replicate it here.

For those of us who do the family history work and have lots of family members counting on us to provide ordinances, ordinances which we want to do as a family and not share with the temple or broader comunity it would be great to have some kind of a family group account where you can add members of your family using their unique identifier and all that are added can see the work reserved to be done and select what work they will print out and do.

For work that has already been printed but noy yet completed when some one elese tries to print it a simple warning message that person x has already printed this please check with them that they are happy for you to complete this work instead would suffice.

This kind of family grouping would encourage more unity in families for both completing temple ordinances and encouraging family history.

The existing systems just do not provide the functionality to bring together families in a way that instills the spirit of elijah and strengthens their resolve to do as much work for their own family as possible.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: linking other topic for this same kind of idea

http://gsfn.us/t/5669l

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Joy Elaine Vester said: I agree with John Martin Toner Donnelly, if implemented his idea would help a lot. I have children who live all over the united states and would like to share my work with them so we can feel united in doing our families temple work.

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Tom Huber said: This is still a very old discussion.

The current situation allows anyone to pick up any ordinances that have been shared with the temple.

Furthermore, there is a two year limit on how long a person can reserve a person's ordinances without doing them.

I don't know, but I think the idea never got very far and died along with the discussion.

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Tom Huber said: New Family Search was discontinued a number of years ago.

A new thread should have been started since the previous system is no longer in use.

For work that has already been printed but not yet completed when some one else tries to print it a simple warning message that person x has already printed this please check with them that they are happy for you to complete this work instead would suffice.

Several points. As long as you have the ordinances in your My Reservations list, no one can pull and print an ordinance card to take to the temple. The ordinances are represented by the dark blue icon.

Once the ordinances are shared with temple and they appear in your "Shared" list, the ordinances are represented by the green icon and are available for everyone and anyone can print the ordinance card and take it to the temple. In that respect, it is as if a patron had picked up the name from the temple when they attended but did not have family names with them.

Once another user takes action with respect to an ordinance, that ordinance is no longer available, but reserved for 90 days by the person who pulled the ordinance. The icon will have changed from green to dark blue.

If the ordinances are not performed within ninety days, they automatically revert to their original position on the temple list and the icon reverts to green.

We are all members of the family of man. I have three children who are actively involved with family history work and attending the temple. In all three cases, they are working with their husbands' families, because their family history is not nearly as far along as my ancestral lines.

With the new system, they can look through the family pedigree chart and see a green temple icon. At that point, they can print the ordinances and go to the temple. They don't have to coordinate with anyone else or belong (if you proposal was implemented) to a family group.

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Tom Huber said: Going back to your initial comment, when my wife and I visited with our daughter in Idaho Falls, we had names to take to the temple. Her children also had names from their father's ancestral lines and we all attended the same baptism session. At that point, anyone could witness the baptism and as such, all of them participated either as baptismal participants or as witnesses.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: Tom you made the same comment on the other thread, and again I reply with the same or similar, the problem with sharing them with the temple is as you said, any one can pick them up.

It still means I have to go in select the ordinances and then share them, then my relative has to go in and manually find the ones I shared.

The proposed system would mean family members have shared access to the reserved ordinance pool, it's a better system that much more family oriented and encourages the whole family to work together to complete the work fo their ancestors.

Not sure if you can tell, but we know the current system that you can share with the temple and anyone can pick up the ordinance. The fact we are still requesting this family group ordinance list should give some indication that what's in place does not fulfill our needs.

It would be so great if this could be implemented.

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Tom Huber said: But other relatives of those persons in the pool will not be able to take those ordinances of the names reserved by the group to the temple. You have effectively robbed other relatives of their opportunity to perform the vicarious ordinances for their ancestors.

The present system does not do that. The whole idea of a group does not take into account all of the many relatives that a person may have and prevents them from performing the vicarious ordinances for their relatives.

That alone runs counter to Church policy.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: In that case your objection of this system is not an objection of this suggestion, your objecting against people being able to make reservations at all.

Think about it. If I reserve ordinances for my family tree then they are reserved. No one else can do them. Just me and who ever I choose to share them with. And right now I do have ordinances reserved.

Basically you just accused me of stealing. Of being a thief.

The present system does do that!

And the proposal here does not change that in any way at all.

The only difference is that more of my family will be able to print from my list without asking me to share it.

In essences this system does the opposite of what you just said to a small degree.

It sounds like you don't know how the current system works, either that or your being a troll an purposefully objecting with false information.

Let me be clear I currently have almost 400 reserved ordinances right now in my list which will be completed by myself, my parents, my wife, my 2 sisters and my brother in law.

They are all reserved to my account. No one else can do them unless I give permission by sharing them. This group thing is another form of sharing, it's me automatically sharing my entire list with my family.

Your argument is flawed and you really should understand how the system works before trying to tear down this idea.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: Oh and FYI, church does not have a policy that states it is wrong to do this. Churches priority is that ordinances be completed and that our ancestors be sealed together and to us.

It doesn't matter who performer's the vicarious ordinances as long as they are performed. Also if a person not in the group or even at present messaged me and asked and said this is also my ancester would you mind releasing the work for me, I would say yes and release it.

The only policy that church has is that we do not offend any one living by performing ordinances where they object to us performing them, which is the main reason for the 110 year policy.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: Oh and this is backed up by the recent message from church leaders where they said that if you have done as much work going backwards as you can, start going the other way and research the descendants of your ancestors, and their descendants.

Those people would not be my ancestors and yet we have been encouraged to do the work for them.

Now please I would much prefer to spend my time building on this idea and gaining support for it than having to argue because you don't agree with people being able to make reservations.

I suggest if you disagree with reservations you start a thread about it.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Hi John,

There is merit in the family-oriented group concept that you are proposing, although the mechanisms mentioned here might conflict with other mandates the leadership of the church has tasked FS with. I think it would be a useful thing if you would put together some of your suggestions and create a new topic focused on them. This topic is ancient and was written originally against the NewFamilyTree database that was an entirely different beast in a totally different time from what we have today.

Basically you just accused me of stealing. Of being a thief

Although Tom sort of said that, I think what he was really getting at is that it comes down to a matter hoarding blessings. Its where a person reserves a pile of names--far more than they can do themselves--in order to provide those names under their own control and judgement to other people in their family. But then hundreds (or even thousands) of relatives of those names are then locked out and cannot obtain those names to take to the temple.

We have been informed that the church leadership wants to move us away from that model. They don't want one person in the family being the "expert" and doing all of the research work and then distributing cards throughout the family. They want EVERYONE to be familiar with doing these things so that when the family "genealogist" passes away, the work can continue unabated from generation to generation.

The Ordinances Ready tool was one such thing supporting this. This way everyone is responsible for getting and printing out their own names to take to the temple. And it gave people access to names that had been shared with the temple that they could not easily get at before. In just the last 2 weeks we now have been given the ability for anyone to directly request names that others have shared with the temple without having to go and get their permission or assistance.

You can also see it in other changes being made. The size of reservation lists has been significantly limited (I've hear of people who've had hundreds of thousands of names reserved--that would be impossible for them to achieve even in several lifetimes). Reservation times have also been reduced.

It seems obvious that being able to do the work for your extend family is a great and spiritual idea. However, there is a significant urgency to get the myriad numbers of names that are ready to the temple. Allowing people (or even family groups) large numbers of reserved names will prevent that from happening as quickly.

I do know that FS has been looking at these types of capabilities for a while. That's why getting a new topic up for them to consider can be useful. But for what it's worth, after seeing all of the other changes being made here, I just can't see them setting up anything that would allow people to have total control over collecting and holding names for their own private purposes. Otherwise, why would they have gone to the trouble to add the ability to extract names from those shared with the temple by other non-related individuals?

I CAN see the ability to have a "Shared" type group to assist in family focus activities. But I don't see FS setting something like that up in a way where no other relatives outside the group could get to its contents if they wanted to.

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John Martin Toner Donnelly said: Hi Jeff

I do understand where your coming from with this. Thank you for being constructive. Yeah I totally agree being able to hoard hundreds of thousands of names is not a great idea but this would not be that at all.

All the current functionality like the ordinance ready system would still be there and in place and totally usable, this would be a simple shared access to a single reservation list.

In my opinion this would help encourage family members to work together on genealogy. As you said right now you get one genealogist in the family and when they pass away it's hard for some one else to pick up. But why do you only get one?

It's possible that they want all the ordinances in one place so they can easily see all the work to be done. This family group proposal would encourage and enhance families abilities to work together, which would in turn teach all family members about the system and spark their interest and ability to help not just perform ordinances but to research new ancestors.

Usually you find that the one who has all the reservations will work on them, but if another family member goes to the temple and doesn't get a chance to speak to the genealogist of the family they end up doing temple file. That's not a bad thing per day, but this would allow them to not have to speak to the genealogist of the family and to go in themselves to print from the family group reservation list. This would be a benefit in getting those large number of names ready for the temple to the temple.

It's possible family search could put in place an upper limit on the amount of ordinances that can be reserved to your list. This should and would be the same for individual or family accounts. By no means am I trying to say that a group should be able to hoard hundreds of thousands of names.

Its also possible that FS may want to limit this to family members on groups. Not sure if that would be a good thing or bad thing. It would mean you can't have a group of strangers banding together, or entire wards banding together. Those single lone church members with no other family to help them complete ordinances would still be able to share with the temple (as would the family group).

This also means that one person in the family would not be in control but the whole family are able to choose from the entire reserved list.

This thread is old yes and I will start another one, probably next week when I'm not messaging from a phone.

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Tom Huber said: Please. Discuss the issues, not personalities.

Outside of reserving and taking ordinances to the temple, a private Facebook page is far better suited to encouraging your family members to engage in family history research and temple attendance.

It is true that you cannot reserve and take ordinances to the temple, but you cannot use the proposed FamilySearch group to encourage research and activity. All you can do is provide the names.