Can't reserve ordinances that have been shared with the temple?

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: I'm sure someone else has asked this, but I've never been good at finding anything in the getsatisfaction system.

But I was in the temple tonight, whipped out a couple of cards in my wallet, and discovered one was already done, one was reserved with the temple and not printed, and I found that I couldn't reserve it. Luckily I had an unreserved card that I had forgotten I had put into my wallet, and so I used that (old card, but the ordinance WAS recorded).

But... I thought that if something was shared with the temple system, someone COULD reserve it. Or is that ONLY through ordinance ready? Or is there still a barrier between temple districts and reachable people reserved with a different temple district?

Just wondering....

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: It's an upcoming feature. Not allowed right now.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: The ability to reach into a "Shared with the temple" pool and pull out a name? (Isn't that an available pool option from the Ordinances Ready button?)

Why, yes.. yes it is.
https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

Where does Ordinances Ready get names?
Information for Members

The Ordinance Ready feature helps you find names easily for your next temple trip. The names provided may be from your own family, or *they may be names that other Church members have shared with the temple.*

(emphasis mine)

Later on that same page it says:
- Your family names that you shared with the temple. These are names that you reserved in Family Tree and then shared with the temple. They are on your family names list. As long as a temple has not yet printed a shared name, the Ordinances Ready feature can unshare the name so you can print the card.

- Names of people who are related to you that have been shared with the temple by someone else. These names are in your tree and were reserved by someone else and then shared by that other person with the temple.

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- Names not related to you that have been shared with the temple. If no ordinances are available from other sources, Ordinances Ready will retrieve available ordinances that have been submitted to the temple by any patron. These ordinances from temple inventory will be provided in the same order they were submitted to the temple. You can perform ordinances for these individuals to whom you may or may not have a direct relationship.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Just seems odd you can't manually do what Ordinances Ready appears to do.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I believe things work like this (please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere):

It used to be that each temple had a "pipe" for names. When someone shared a name with the temple, they put it into one end of the "pipe" for the temple who's district they lived in. When a temple wanted to provide names for ANY patrons that didn't bring their own names to the temple, the temple would pull those needed names out of the other end of the "pipe". If the temple was a small one where most patrons brought their own names, names that had been submitted to the pipe could end up sitting in the pipe for a long time.

Recently this system was upgraded so that now there is only ONE shared pipe feeding ALL temples. When a temple needs names to give out, they pull from the common pipe. This way names are not delayed by being held up in districts where most patrons bring their own names.

In all of these cases, when the temple took any of those names from the pipe and distributed them to patrons needing names, it was all done completely independent of whether or not the patron was related to the name given to them by the temple.

However, some people have been wanting to get names that are already in the pipe (i.e., shared with the temple) for people that they are specifically related to, and take them to the temple. This capability is currently being added to the existing system, but at present it is only partly implemented.

Currently, Ordinances Ready will look specifically for your relatives that have been placed in the pipe as part of its searching sequence. So you CAN pull names that you are related to from the shared pipe, but you are significantly limited to the few choices that Ordinances Ready gives you. Also, those names you select are given a "temporary reserve" for you. That means you only get 90 days in which to do the work before your reservation is removed.

At present, the only way that you can randomly go in and personally reserve a relative to take to the temple when that name has already been shared with the temple (i.e., by being placed into the temple "pipe"), is to contact the help desk and see if they will put it on a "temporary reserve" for you. We are still waiting for the ability where a person can go into FS and perform this operation for their self.

Note that the term "temporary reservation" is my own terminology since the word "reserve" has multiple meanings the way FS uses it. Remember that any name that is already shared with the temple, is ALREADY "reserved" by someone else. When you are given the name by the temple to do the work, it does NOT really remove the original reservation of the person that shared it with the temple.

Essentially the temple system has just given you the right to do the temple work for a name with a 90 day expiration date.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Thank you for that very thorough explanation.

To your last comments, I'm really torn on the idea that a name of the submitter is still connected to a name that is shared with the templei admire their willingness to collect names to share with the temple, and am sympathetic towards those that are single and cannot do work for people of the opposite gender, but I guess I see it as, if you share it with the intention that you ate not going to do it yourself, then let it go.

There shouldn't be any strings attached that keep others from doing the work.

I just checked the my contributions portion on the mobile app and there's no scoring for temple submissions, so I don't see a gamification factor being encouraged or promoted.

And the Far report only shows one submission per year, regardless of volume, but I don't think that detail is known by the general membership, and I don't want to even assume that this is a motivation. But I am a little disappointed when I see people who are picking up names and immediately sharing them with the temple, and it locks those names out from family members who want to do them. As a high counselor in our stake role me, it's really hard to promote work for our ancestors to our kids when they hit ordinances ready and get no ancestors or relatives. (They want their children to have their hearts turned to their forefathers.)

My own wife has a very strong bias towards serving only her family members, and doesn't like the idea when I suggest she could be helping others in need, and she responds with her service to her family is what she's doing and that's okay.

As I re read conference tasks from last Oct, I was struck by the talk on Saturday morning regarding our receptivity to personal revelation and the prompting of the Holy Ghost increases when our focus of prayers and efforts are directed towards serving others.

(sorry for the overtly religious tangent. My intent is to "equalize" or "neutralize" the bias towards holding on to names that are collectively shared with the temple vs withholding that opportunity for others to serve the people whose names we perform ordinances for.

(I don't think I clearly made that case, in any regards.

Thank you again for your detailed explanation Jeff!

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Justin,

We are evolving from a system that had many limitations to one that has fewer limitations. Remember, originally when you submitted a name to the temple, that was it. The work would be done by someone potentially not even related. It was in the system and you wouldn’t get it back.

Now with the FS website, after you have shared a name with the temple, if you later wanted to, you could retrieve that name and do the temple work yourself. The issue, of course was that no relatives could selectively access that name for temple work.

With Ordinances Ready you can now retrieve the name of a relative that someone else has shared with the temple so that you can do the temple work yourself. Your ability to choose exactly which name is quite limited of course. This is partly because of the intended use of Ordinances Ready.

Please note that because of this capability built into the tool, when our youth “hit Ordinances Ready and get no ancestors or relatives”, it is NOT because names of their relatives have been shared with the temple. It is because those names:

- are not entered into the FT yet
- already have their temple work done
- do not have enough information identified
- are being hoarded on someone’s reserve list

The first 3 items are resolved by the youth learning to do the research work prior to going to the temple. The last item (which IS a problem) has only been addressed by the reduction of the reserved names period to 2 years or by contacting FS help desk to get names released to you.

We know that this direction is being further pursued at this time. Eventually anyone should be able to do the temple work for any relative that has been shared with the temple. So in the near future, the problem of people being “locked out” of doing the work for a relative that was shared with the temple will no longer exist.

Having the name of the original reserver and submitter to the temple associated with a name really should not be a concern IMHO. When someone is given a “temporary reserve” on a temple-shared name so that they can do the temple work, it overrides the original reserver’s rights to do anything on that person until the temporary reserve expires (90 days). At that time it returns to the temple queue under the original reserver’s name.

I really like this. As many others do, I do the research and then fully vet all the information on my names. Once a sufficient amount of properly sourced data is provided, I reserve and then share that name with the temple since this is the fastest way to get the work done. It also is a flag that all of the preparatory work on the name research is completed.

Since I reserved the name originally, I can track to see that the work happens. I personally don’t care who does the temple work as long as it gets done. If another relative wants to do it, great! They can get at it through ordinances ready, and eventually they can directly get a temporary reserve on it themselves. In the meantime they could contact the help desk or even message me directly. If they do not get around to it and it expires, I can then go in and un-share the name to do the temple work myself if I want.

So I’m not concerned at all about the sharing with temple issues as the current issues are in the very process of being resolved.

And one last item regarding name hoarding...

I find it difficult to believe that people are actually collecting 200-300 thousand names of legitimately sourced and vetted records THAT ARE OF THEIR OWN RELATIVES. Something really wrong is happening there as we are only supposed to be reserving names of our own relatives.

I am not sure what else could be done about the reserved name hoarding that exists. We have heard of some cases where some … [truncated]

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Thanks Jeff.

A couple of points...

to your last paragraph... Ordinances Ready seems to short circuit the need for any research for taking names. That said, we'll run out of names in 5-4-3... :-)

I agree that people should be trained to do the analysis. The church is expending a LOT of effort to make it easier for newbies to be able to do the work, and watching one of the keynote speeches from Rootstech, there's a LOT of effort going into putting together memories and stories and making ancestors "come to life". It's not the first time I've seen/heard references to getting out of the youth's way and watching them excel. But I wonder if this is an 80/20 rule kind of problem where a tremendous amount of effort is going to be invested in trying to make it simpler for many people to help them avoid the tougher research efforts, which may not be possible to get away from.

I'm really digressing here now.... I listened to another keynote speech, which also included a talk by the myheritage CEO. From a webinar from the family history fanatics referring to the same speech, they were REALLY excited (look it up, I made a BIG note about how excited one of the hosts was. particularly as I was listening to it at 2X speed while driving down the road at 1.2X. LOL)

The point they were making was that with the release of a HUGE amount of city directories, it was not making it easier to have "continuous research linkages" that (with a little machine language) make it very possible to almost have your family history... ummm (searching for the right word here) temporal path (place/time) mapped out, with Census records being a "check" or "waypoint". A netherlands site I saw today seemed to be trying to do the same thing with their marriage certificates multi-generationally in creating family trees...

I'm rambling, and it's 3:33 am... need to go to bed.

Bottom line... thank you!

BTW, I had a long discussion with a familysearch developer yesterday, and a brief conversation with a manager the day before, and they're really exploring some interesting options with machine learning to enhance the ease at matching records to people. (blathering again...) Having studied some of the legal and liability issues assigned to machine learning, and comparing it to decision-making in record matching, there's an interesting conundrum in trying to reverse-engineer a "bad choice", or "less-than-optimal choice". For instance, an autonomous vehicle gets in an accident (or makes a decision resulting in an accident). Trying to assign liability or determine who is at fault could be difficult when the past "learning" could have influenced a present or future decision. How does one "debug" this? The present efforts have been to "reset" them and start over. (You may have heard of machine language systems turned on to the internet to learn to communicate and picking up all the most vile and foul-mouthed characteristics of others in their communications, even though there are certainly good people out there. It appeared to follow a "consensus" in what is acceptable language and adopted it.

Made me think of this funny video I saw a reference to in a blog today... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgRoi...