Does Familysearch software check if old ordinance dates are post death date?

LegacyUser

Anita Grace Clayton said: Does the familysearch software check to see if a person was dead before their work was done? I know they do now for new work, but does it find older ordinances that were done too soon? Let me explain why I worry. I am a convert and I had found when FS first went on line, what 12 years ago?, that my father and a lot of his family had work done on the basis of an old poorly estimated Pedigree Resource File. My father and a lot of his immediate family and spouses were still alive and yet work had been done. I had it "undone" for those in his immediate family who were still living, so that it could be done in due time. So I am wondering, do I need to go through and check that the dates were not before the person's death or has that issue been resolved in the past 12 years? If it happened on this family it may have happened on others. I would hate to undertake the project of checking them all.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: That is interesting. If the temple differentiates between living ordinances and proxy ordinances, then it should be able to. However, if it does not differentiate between it, then I don't know how they would be able to do this.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: I assume you've reviewed this help article:

https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

It is quite easy to just assign the person as "deceased" to allow ordinances to be completed. Regrettably a few users shoot for 'quantity' rather than 'quality.'

LegacyUser

Anita Grace Clayton said: I can't get that article to come up, but it is true that it is/was too easy to be able to declare someone dead. Especially the old Temple Ready Program was bad for that, so glad that was changed. I was once years ago helping a man at the Family History Center. He wanted to get his cousin's wife ready for work. He had no death date but assured me he had heard she died. So I made him started looking for the death info and found none. I felt strongly that she was a live. She was the same age as the man who wanted to have her work done. Finally in desperation I suggested we call the cemetery where her husband was buried and asked if she was there. "Not yet" was the reply. Got our chuckle for the day and got him to stop asking to do it, but two weeks later he was back again. Luckily I overheard his conversation with a coworker and set them straight again. Who knows if he came in a third time and did it anyway.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I couldn't see it either. However, if you go to the FamilySearch website and first login there, THEN come back to the Feedback forum and click on Robert's link, you should be able to see it then.

Very weird though. Normally only the "Members Information" articles are the only ones that require login in order to view them. This one is not marked as a "Members Information" one at all.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Yeah some people are just ridiculous!

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: This is the article:

LegacyUser

Anita Grace Clayton said: OK, I know how to undo an ordinance done too soon, but what I need to know - is the system check for this error? I would really hate the project of checking them all. I know I could never complete that and we shouldn't have to, should we?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Jeff, since the article deals with ordinances, it would be for members only, even though there is no mention.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yea, I guessed as much. As usual, it is inconsistent with only member information articles in that it doesn't have the member information marker.

Also as is typical, although the Familysearch Terms of Use date of update and the FS Privacy Notice date of update are both provided, we still have no clue as to when that article was last updated!

And even though the update dates for the Terms of Use and the Privacy Notice are both identified on that page, there is no way to even access those documents from that page.

So you have date information about things that you can't see, but you DON'T have it for all of the text on that page that you CAN see. Wow.

LegacyUser

ATP said: It's calling shifting responsibilty. It's the new cultural norm! : )

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Have you tried accessing those documents from this page? It is like the menu items at the top -- broken. I don't know if this is a site-wide problem (in terms of what is in the footer of this and most FS pages, but there are some significant problems with both the footer (for many pages) and the header (for GetSat).

The request for effectivity dates on all articles is an old one and one that has yet to be addressed.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Something to keep in mind -- if you have Church ancestry (that is, some of your relatives converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), then the ordinances may very well have been living.

To determine if they joined the Church and participated in Church ordinances while alive, you need to compare their death date with their ordinance dates and the temples involved. It is not unusual to see sealings performed during their lifetime with the place indicated as the Endowment House (in Salt Lake City), which is where many ordinances took place while the Salt Lake Temple was being constructed. The first temple built and dedicated in the Utah Territory was the Saint George Temple in southern Utah.

There are two dates that I always check with regard to the death date (and I have only branch of one ancestral line that were members):

death date and ordinance dates. If any ordinances were performed within a year following the death, I report that (I've run into that only once).

If there are no possible living ordinances (the important dates are the baptism and confirmation) that were performed by the relative (there will not be a temple associated with the date) while they were alive, and the vicarious ordinances took place before they died -- and I am sure they did not perform the ordinances for themselves, then I will report those.

Note, there is a way to check without going through each of your deceased relatives that are in FamilySearch, and that is to use Ancestral Quest, Legacy, or Roots Magic, and download your ancestral lines. The free version of each of those fully certified family tree management programs can be used to download from FamilySearch, your ancestral lines. I use Ancestral Quest because it has the same look and feel as the old PAF program. Ancestral Quest Basics is free and may be suitable for setting up a report with complex parameters to produce a list of any whose ordinance dates are questionable. A comparison chart is at https://www.ancquest.com/CompareAQVer... for the free vs the paid version.

Legacy and Roots Magic are the other two fully certified programs, but they have similar features, but a different user interface. Each program has their fans. They may (or not) have similar comparison charts on their sites between the free version and paid versions, such as that which Ancestral Quest has.

There is another advantage to using these programs and maintaining a local database: it is private and you can add work with living people just as easily as you can with deceased people. In addition, if a well-meaing user happens to mangle your ancestral lines in the massive FamilySearch FamilyTree, you have a base by which you can work with your local database to restore the FamilySearch record to what it was before the mangling took place.

LegacyUser

Anita Grace Clayton said: Oh, I have been subscribed to Ancestral Quest for about 12 years. I do not know how people work without their own database. It is good to know that AQ has that capability. I tend not to use the bells and whistles and just use it for my personal data base and copious notes on people. But having said that, I think that the FS computer people need to figure out a way to make sure that ordinances were not done before a person died. You and I may check ours, but what about the gazillions of others that are not checked?

So I guess the answer to my original question is, "No, the records are not checked to see if the ordinances were done while a live."? I am in this alone for both my lines and my husband's. It is incredibly overwhelming to think that I need to check them all, even with the AQ feature. There is so much to do without adding that, too.

LegacyUser

Anita Grace Clayton said: I have no idea what you just said, but then you were not naysaying............ At least I don't think so.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: You and me, both.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: To answer one of the questions in this thread. No the system does not do checks to determine if proxy ordinances were completed before a person's death. I believe there are several reasons for this (1) many records do not have a death date and therefore there is no valid way to check the ordinance date against a death date. (2) combining and merging carry ordinances to the new record which could be incorrect and therefore again the complications of checking would place a strain on the system.

I know the system does not check because I have had to request ordinances be removed from several records where the date was inconsistent with known death dates. These are old records from the 1800's and the problem was usually an incorrectly merged/combined record. The ordinance issue was resolved but only because I intervened. The system does not automatically flag.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine if the ordinance was a proxy ordinance or a living ordinance. I think it is unlikely that any system checks will be introduced soon because I believe it only impacts a few records and is probably not worth the programming effort to test. User eyes are better for this type of review.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Anita,

Tom's first paragraph is referring to this:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

His last sentence is talking about the effectivity dates on all of the Knowledge Articles in the Help system (i.e., the date that any given article was last updated). There are no effectivity dates in our knowledge articles so you have no idea of how old they are. Since the FS site software constantly changes and the User Interfaces being rearranged, very old Knowledge Articles may no longer be valid.