temples not returning temple cards. Why is one of the reasons to prevent duplication this does not

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Jane K Scea said: The reason given in the article Do temples still return temple cards is to prevent duplication. How does not returning temple cards prevent duplication.

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Tom Huber said: Actually, it makes a lot of sense. The problem was that in the rush to return cards to the patrons, the cards would stick together and some would not be scanned.

With the cards returned to the patron, an audit could not be performed which is where your "How does not returning card..." question comes into play.

Another reason is staffing the office, especially in smaller temples. They not only do not have sufficient staff, but also lack space to store the cards that are not picked up.

This decision was made by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve in conjunction with the Temple Department.

Now, when an ordinance takes place, a message is sent to the patron through the FamilySearch message system. If the patron does not receive confirmation that the ordinances were performed within a day or so, they need to contact the temple office with the time and ordinance(s) involved.

If a member is concerned about the decision and since it was made at the highest levels of the Church, they need to discuss their concerns with their local Stake President.

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gasmodels said: The other issue for those temples which stored cards in a file for other members of the stake to pick up and complete, there existed numerous old cards for which the reservations had expired or someone had reprinted the card and the ordinances had already been completed. My temple verified all of the cards in the file in our temple when they were destroyed and found that over 60 percent were already completed so if someone had taken a card to complete they were in many cases doing duplicate work. Having cards around is not a good practice because it is not always easy to verify whether the work needs to be done.

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JimGreene said: Another way that this prevents duplication is that cards with some ordinances done (say B and C) and others not done yet (I, E, SP, SS) go back to the patron, and the patron holds the cards for a while. Electronically we are tracking expiration dates. The ordinances not yet performed could hit an expiration date and go back into the pool of ordinances that can be requested. Someone else sees that they are available and requests them, prints a card, and performs them. Meanwhile, the person who has the original card where the B and C were recorded, does not realize that the other ordinances have expired and takes the card (or shares the card with someone) and performs the ordinances. Duplication. If we are going to have expiration dates for the amount of time that ordinances can be reserved, then it makes sense, and reduces duplication to not return cards. The ordinances are done, and recorded, and the card is destroyed. Make sense?

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Jeff Wiseman said: That makes a LOT of sense. I always knew that there is a problem with people's cards expiring and them not knowing it but going ahead and using the expired cards. Given all the other reasons for not returning cards (e.g., time for workers to record and audit them, storage space, etc.), this is the single most significant reason that I have heard so far for the new policy about not returning ordinance cards.

If a person who has done the B, C, and I ordinances for a person goes to print out a card for them to do the E or later ordinances while not realizing that their reservation has expired, The system will prevent them from printing a new card!

This is excellent, and I totally missed that advantage. I don't remember it being specifically discussed anywhere here when all of the other benefits on the non-return of cards were going on.

And with the increase of "short-term" reservations being made through Ordinances Ready, this definitely will reduce duplicated temple work.

Thanks for providing the answer Jim!

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Chuckie King said: There are lots of reasons to return the cards to patrons also. Among other reasons, I have found them invaluable in correcting things when others disassemble families in my line.Retaining the cards may make sense in preventing duplication, but for other purposes it does not make sense, which I will not go into here.

But I do want to know: the temple dept knows what cards are about to expire and who reserved them. Is there a reason why the church cannot just send an email to the patrons telling them something like"The following ordinance cards will expire on such and such date, the ordinances will be released and made available for others. If you do not perform these ordinances by that date, please destroy these cards ..."

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gasmodels said: With the ability to reprint cards the department does not really know if there are multiple copies of cards and they do send a message about expiring cards as well as showing the expiration date on the list. Do people really need a hammer to know that they have an expiring card.

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Chuckie King said: I would think every time someone touches a card the dept. knows about it -- in fact, I recall seeing messages warning about reprinting. And of course that a card has been a reprinted is noted on the card itself.

And apparently people do need a hammer to know they have an expiring card and they need to do something about it. This is the reason (which I accept) why we can get the duplicates Jim Greene described -- people do let the cards expire and then do the ordinance anyway.

Yes, now that you mention it I do recall seeing some warning about expiring cards -- although in my case, I rarely see them since mine almost always get done before they expire. My point is they could rely on that mechanism to prevent duplication, rather than confiscate our cards. (Would it be too much to ask patrons to scan their cards for validity when they arrive at the temple? -- in the Provo temple a while ago and maybe still they did scan scan cards and even had them stamped before we went on an endowment session.)

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gasmodels said: It was probably some sort of trial/test of alternatives. Personally I am very happy with the current situation and it creates must less traffic in the administrative part of the temple. Print your card do the ordinances and get an email saying they were completed. Not more keeping a pile of partially completed cards or losing cards. I agree I use more paper but now all I do is put in my bag a few cards that I can do when I go to the temple with a selection of ordinances that allow me to have total flexibility without having to pick up anything after and when they are gone I know they are done.

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Jeff Wiseman said: A few thoughts on this (please forgive my nit-picking)

First of all, it's a good idea to remember that the CARDS do not expire, it's the RESERVATION on the name that expires. When the reservation expires, there should be no cards out there giving someone the false sense that they still have the reservation. That's why the quicker the cards are removed from someone after the ordinances are performed, the better.

I have found them invaluable in correcting things when others disassemble families in my line

I have all of my vetted data from the FSFT backed up to my Ancestral Quest database on my computer. I'm not sure how using the cards to fix up mistakes made on FS would be any better--other than if you don't have a computer of course :-)

People can't be relied on to verify their reservations before taking those cards to the temple. If they don't have a card in the first place because the system won't let them print a card out for a name that they have no reservation on, problem solved.

There was a lot of duplicate work being done for the simple reason that people were NOT checking their reservations before taking an old card to the temple. An now days, an "Old card" might only be 95 days old.

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Chuckie King said: I have everything secured on my Ancestral Quest also. The problem is what people do on FS to destroy family relationships and ordinances, thus hindering future ordinance work. Here's a current of how using cards can fix problems:

Decades ago I uploaded to the church database (Pedigree Resource File or one of its predecessors) the Charles Christian/ Mary Leak family and did ordinance work for the couple and several children. Recently some patron or patrons (of 58 who have touched the data) dismembered the family, substituting without documentation an Andrew Christian for Charles both in this marriage and in his father’s family. (Part of this was the bizarre undocumented merging of Charles’ second wife Judith Woodson into Mary.)

But I have some tools to reconstruct the family. One of those is a temple slip recording the sealing of Charles and Mary. This sealing was done before PIDs were printed on ordinance slips, so I tried a FS “search with relationship” under the two names as printed on the slips, but this turned up nothing. Searching using Mary’s current spelling (Mary Leake) returned over 800,0000 results, of which the first 25 had no Mary Leak or anything close to it for Charles’ wife.

So I have sent the slip to the research folks to see if they can find this couple and their sealing ordinance preparatory to an attempt to reconstruct the family. Had this slip been discarded, I would not have had this tool available.Will also be able to use the childrens' cards (which do have PIDs) to put them in their proper place.

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JimGreene said: More than a year ago we began sending you messages within FamilySearch documenting all of the ordinance work that was done for both requested ordinances that you performed, as well as for ordinances you shared with the temple or others. That electronic record of completion is accepted by those in support just like a card or a slip would be--when that help is needed to reconstruct things. In fact, it is much easier to forward the message with the pertinent information than it is to take a picture or a scan of a card. We recognize that there are those who have implemented personal systems for years of tracking ordinances completed and using cards to keep a backup record, and we are moving their cheese. However, in this case the benefits have been weighed against the detriments, and the decision was made that it is better to move the cheese and receive all of the benefits (some of which you will not see for years), than to provide backward compatibility. We simply had to severe the paper tie sooner rather than later.
We know that this will be disruptive. We did not make the decision lightly, in fact it has taken years to make and begin to implement it. But we do know that it is necessary or we would not have done it. We apologize for the disruption, nobody enjoys it, at first--we hope you all will at last.

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gasmodels said: Another way to do this is look in the IGI and then follow the record to it current location in Family Tree. It will usually tell you if there has been some bad merges along the way. There are multiple records for Charles Christian/ Mary Leak in the IGI. I choose this one to follow --- https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/619...

In the url see -- M9HW-P3R that is the ID of the original record for Charles - you can find in the url -- Mary"s you will find by clicking on her name and looking in the Citation on the left --- M9HW-PQC -- (you can also find Charles' in the Citation if click on his name) Note the two ID's are identical except for the last two characters. If you use these two ID and put them in recents both take you through several merges to end at the following records. --- Andrew Christian 94KX-HRP and Mary Leake LZKF-G4Y. The original birth dates have also changed. I do not know whether the merges are correct or the birth dates changes are reasonable. But I do know the method has proven quite useful to map original IGI records to current Family Tree records.

My guess is that there are multiple records merged together here and that it may or may not contain the earliest ordinances. There are multiple IGI records for Charles Christian and Mary Leake without any children which would imply a sealing to spouse associated so I would believe these ordinances have been completed multiple times.

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Chuckie King said: So ... will the message I get preserve the original PID, regardless of whatever merges and changes others have made to the record? And after I have processed a hundred slips will I be able to easily find the individual whom someone has tinkered with years later? Right now I can only see one name at a time, and I see no search function within that feature.

And after I find the ordinance, if that person has been merged or deleted, when I click on the name (I assume the name as I entered it will survive) will the ordinances as I did them, along with the original detail data, sources and such, be preserved? In other words, will the original record still be there, regardless of what others have done? Those original records are what I would need to reconstruct a family

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Chuckie King said: Well, nice of you to help,but this does not get me to my original record -- and of course part of the problem is that IGI mangled data also, particularly when it was ported over the the newer systems.

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JimGreene said: Original temple ordinance records are always preserved and a data admin will be able to always get the original ordinance attached to the original people. Their biggest concern is whether the ordinance actually happened or not, so if you can provide that evidence then what was tangled can be untangled.The biggest concern is always whether we do something that says an ordinance was done, and then we prevent it from being re-done, and it turns out that there are two people in the mess and only one received the ordinance and all of our best intentions prevented the other from receiving theirs. It is much better to duplicate than to deny. Please rest assured that we are on a necessary path.

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Tom Huber said: A couple of points beyond what Jim as said. We users have been assured that no ordinance data is ever lost. It is maintained in a separate temple ordinance database. Merges are tracked internally in the FamilySearch FamilyTree database, so that the thread goes back to the original (first) valid temple ordinance(s) for that person, regardless of the PID for the person.

Note, there are a couple of exceptions. Confirmation and Initiatory were, for a period of time, not maintained in the temple ordinance database. If you look at the old Family Group Sheets that were used to perform ordinances, you won't see those two ordinances on the sheet. For a short period of time, they were not maintained in the ordinance database, which is why they can appear out of order. In some instances, the two ordinances are indicated as "Completed" with no temple or dates. Where the ordinance was later performed (as a duplicate, the date always overwrote the "Completed" text. I do not know if that is still the case, but regardless, we are assured, whether there is a date or the word "Completed", that the vicarious ordinance(s) has(have) been performed.

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Tom Huber said: I believe it was Ron Tanner who originally indicated that plans were in the works for us to be able to print a completed temple ordinance card for our own records and that it would contain the data for that person at the time the person had their ordinances reserved. It has been a while since that was expressed, so I don't know where FamilySearch is in providing that ability, or if it is still a future feature to be developed or perhaps shelved.

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Chuckie King said: Yes, I understand that the church always has the original record and can get to it.

But you have not answered my individual questions -- which had to do with whether I would be able find and get to it without having to contact the data administrator. In short, will I be able to find and see the data or "card" and its ordinances exactly as I submitted and did the ordinances?

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Tom Huber said: As I wrote below

I believe it was Ron Tanner who originally indicated that plans were in the works for us to be able to print a completed temple ordinance card for our own records and that it would contain the data for that person at the time the person had their ordinances reserved. It has been a while since that was expressed, so I don't know where FamilySearch is in providing that ability, or if it is still a future feature to be developed or perhaps shelved.

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Chuckie King said: Of course we have yet to see that either approved or put into action. But yes, that would help, if we could save them and reproduce the cards three on a sheet as we do when we originally print them. To do otherwise, for example putting the card data on one sheet or in some other format, would not best and make for awkward record keeping. Right now I take a photo of the card and attach it to my Ancestral Quest database -- everything in one place.

I started this discussion narrowly focused on being able to have access to the original data. There are other issues with shredding the cards after each ordinance which I have not addressed, and which i only mention here. For example, having to reprint the cards after each ordinance is a major annoyance.

Then there is the issue of the recorder making errors. Right now if I see a mistake I can get it corrected before I leave the temple. Once the card is recorded and shredded, with the data set in stone in the cloud, there is no paper trail -- will the church take my word for it that I did the ordinance on Tuesday the 21st, not Wednesday the 22nd?

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gasmodels said: If you reserved, you should get a message saying the ordinance that was completed and the date. That message is your "paper trail" but it is digital rather than paper. That is the documentation you need to save. It is attached to your account in Family Search. You can delete the messages (not a good idea in my opinion). You can email them to yourself and print them (your paper trail) or you could save the email's as images.

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Jeff Wiseman said: And regarding the recorder making errors, by having the cards in their possession for a longer time and not having to rush to get them back to patrons, They can run through the cards TWICE and with different people on the second run. I'm not familiar with this workflow but there are folks on this forum who work in the temple and are familiar with this process that might be able to describe how it is being done at present.

JeffLuke

i don't think people are understanding some of the concerns with regards to checking if ordinances are done correctly.

If I bring 20 cards to the temple, and then get home and check for a notification of ordinances being completed, and I see that only 19 were done, how do I know which one was not done? The temple shredded the cards and I have a couple of hundred ordinances reserved.

It means I now have to create a seperate record of every ordinance at the time that I bring it to the temple and then double check it later. So I either take pictures of my ordinance cards or write them out manually. Both of these options are quite silly.

And shredding cards does not do anything to prevent people from duplicating ordinances. I can print out a card and leave it sitting on my desk for 10 years and it will still work at the temple. Whether it sits in a temple drawer after an ordinance, or on my desk makes no difference.