Welcome to the Brigham Young University Family History
Library Webinar Series. My name is Sean Firmage.
I will be your host for this webinar.
Today we will be pleased to hear from Kathryn Grant, who will be
giving a presentation titled, "What every Family Tree User
should know about name-finding apps.
After years on the sidelines, Kathryn started doing
family history and discovered to her surprise that she loved it.
Her specialty is mentoring new family historians and
helping them find success, and maybe even avoid
some of the mistakes that she's made.
Kathryn teaches Sunday classes at the BYU Family History Library.
She also presents at Riverton Saturday Seminars
and other family history events.
Her column on family history ran in the Nauvoo Times
for about a year and is still available online.
Kathryn works for the LDS Church as a technical writer,
with a focus on usability and process improvement.
Besides family history, she loves uplifting music,
thought-provoking books and spring lilacs.
Kathryn, we’ll turn the time over to you.
(Kathryn) Great! Shaun, thank you so much.
Hi everybody and welcome to our webinar today.
As we’ve seen, technology has its blessings and challenges
and we appreciate your patience as we’ve gotten started with this.
Today’s webinar is about a very important topic that has become
of interest to people with the many name-finding apps
being made available to Family Tree users.
Maybe you have had a friend approach you and say something like,
“Hey! Have you tried such-and-such an app?
It’s amazing! In a matter of minutes,
I found over a hundred names for temple work!”
Name-finding apps have become popular in the last few years
for doing family history, but they’re also widely
misunderstood and even misused.
And that misuse has some unexpected consequences.
Today I’m hoping that we can shed some light on those consequences
and talk about how to avoid them.
I hope this webinar will be of help to three main audiences.
The first is for people who are using the apps
or may be considering using the apps.
The second audience is for consultants
who help others to find family names.
And then finally, developers of name-finding apps
or those who may be considering developing a name-finding app.
Here's a short overview of what we’re going to be talking about.
First of all, we’re going to get on the same page as far as what
we’re talking about in this particular webinar
when we say “name-finding apps.”
Then we’re going to talk about some common misconceptions
that people have about name-finding apps.
Then we’ll look at some unintended consequences.
And finally, we’ll look at an alternative approach.
So let’s go ahead and dive in.
What do we mean in this webinar when we talk about name-finding apps?
Basically we’re talking about apps that crawl FamilySearch Family Tree
to find names with green temples.
Why is there such an appeal for name-finding apps?
I am guessing if you joined this webinar,
you’ve probably had more than one friend talk to you about their
favorite name-finding app and how much they love it.
So, why do people love these apps so much?
Well, name-finding apps say that they will save you time,
that they will reduce the effort required for family history,
that they will eliminate the tedium (and who doesn’t want that),
and then finally, they promise to make family history fast and easy.
Now, for a lot of us, especially if we are just starting out,
family history can seem like kind of a black box
and we hear people talk about how they spent years
trying to break down a brick wall.
And we might look at some genealogical problem
and just be completely flummoxed.
What’s not to love about an app that says
it’s going to take away all those problems?
But there’s a little bit more to it, so let’s look at some of the common
misconceptions that happen when people use these apps.
It’s important to point out that people don’t promote
these misconceptions on purpose.
In other words, no user or developer, for that matter,
says, “I think I’ll spread some misconceptions.”
When we have misconceptions, one of the reasons we have them
is that we don’t know they’re misconceptions.
It’s been my experience that these misconceptions
lead to using name-finding apps
and using the apps tends to reinforce the misconceptions.
Let’s look at a few of those misconceptions.
First of all there are three misconceptions
that tend to go hand-in-hand.
The first is that the Church is the entity
that provided the names in Family Tree.
If we think that, it’s not a very far leap
to believe if the Church provided the names,
they must be verified and ready for temple work.
It’s a logical conclusion, right?
Finally, if we believe the Church has provide the names
and they are ready for temple work, it’s not too much of a stretch
to believe Family Tree was supposed to be
an on-going source of temple names.
Let’s take a look at the truth about each of these.
The first misconception that the Church provided
the names in Family Tree is not true.
Where the names came from was users, interestingly enough.
And that's something that is very often misunderstood
especially by new users to FamilySearch because
the FamilySearch website is sponsored by the Church
so it's logical to think the Church provided those names.
But what the Church and and FamilySearch did
was they gathered names that were provided by users.
I have another webinar that goes into a lot more detail
on that so I won’t go into a lot of detail here,
but it's important to realize the names in Family Tree
were ultimately contributed by users.
Here’s an example, for those of you who might remember
the 4-generation program of the last century.
We sent in our family history
on family group sheets like this one.
This is an actual family group sheet for James Waterfield.
He’s got a couple of daughters, but notice there’s no wife,
and there’s a half-sister to these other daughters here,
but the information is scanty.
Rose Hannah has more information; Mary, not so much.
But before we judge people too harshly,
we might look at this record and go,
“Wow, that’s kind of shoddy work! That wasn’t very complete.”
Remember, this sheet was prepared before the days of the internet.
The person may not have even had access to a typewriter back then,
for those of you who know what typewriters are
since we don’t use them much anymore.
I have no doubt this person was doing the very best that they could.
They were following the counsel to collect names
for four generations and to submit them to the church.
And to be honest with you, many of the names that are
submitted to Family Tree, are about of this quality.
It’s harder to see when the name is digital.
We can look at this family group sheet and see there’s a lot missing.
But when you look at this same name in Family Tree,
it's not quite so obvious what's missing.
We don’t want to be judgmental or critical of people
who have put names in Family Tree.
Whether they did it through an old 4-generation program
or they're doing it today, they’re doing the best they can
with the information and skills that they have.
For any of you who have indexed,
you may be familiar with the old extraction program,
which was the forerunner of the indexing program.
Many extracted names were also added to Family Tree.
We see the neat screen in Family Tree and it's all digital
and beautiful and easy to read, and sometimes we don't stop
to think about where that information came from.
It came from a record like this. Some are a little easier to read.
Some are a lot harder. But they were, in many cases,
handwritten records made at the time of the event
by a person who may or may not have had an extensive education.
People were doing their best, but this kind of information
ended up in Family Tree and it varied widely in quality.
So, did the Church verify all the names in FamilySearch Family Tree?
Actually, they didn’t. Not because they didn't want to,
but because it simply wouldn’t be feasible.
Family Tree has 1.1 billion names in it,
so it wouldn’t have been feasible for the Church to get
the staff and the manpower to verify every single one.
The truth is, we the users are responsible for
verifying the names in Family Tree.
Many of those names that we just looked at
became green temples in Family Tree.
So those extracted records or names submitted with the old
3 and 4 generation program, ended up in Family Tree
with green temples looking like they need
temple work when they actually don’t.
And that’s an important thing to be aware of
when you’re using a name-finding app.
In my experience, about 80% of the green temples that I find
in Family Tree do not need temple work and there are
four main reasons for that, that are listed here on the screen.
The first one is they might be a duplicate.
If they are a duplicate of a record that already has
temple work attached, then that work doesn’t need to be done,
the records just need to be merged.
The records might also have errors in vital information.
As an example, I found a record in Family Tree that had come from
an early submission that had the birth place
of Cathearth in Cambridgeshire, England.
And there was no such place as Cathearth, but because
the last name of that person on the record was one of my family names,
and because it was close to where that family lived,
which was actually a place called Chatteris,
I thought there’s something going on, I’m going to check this out.
So I found the original submission and was able to determine
that the person had meant Chatteris and not Cathearth.
But because of the error in that vital information,
a duplicate did not come up when I did the search.
As soon as I corrected the error, the duplicate came up
and this woman’s temple work had already been done.
So errors in vital information can cause problems.
There can be relationship errors. Not too long ago,
I found a mother having children when she was four.
Not so likely, right? So there was a problem there.
Even though those names had green temples on them,
they weren’t ready for temple work.
Another common problem is that people will put in names,
maybe based on a census or they’ll come from extraction,
where they won’t have a death date because they don’t know it
so the person shows up with a green temple,
but a little more research shows that they died before eight
and all they need is sealing to parents.
So green temple names may not need work for any of these reasons
and a name-finding app will normally not be able to distinguish this.
They may tell some duplicates but on most of the rest of them,
these other three bullet points,
they don’t have the programming power
or the algorithms, to determine whether those problems exist.
The last misconception of those three is that Family Tree
is intended to be an ongoing source of temple names.
Again, that’s logical if you think that the Church originally
populated Family Tree with these temple names.
I found that this misconception gets passed so frequently,
kind of like wildfire gossip, from one member to another.
Where I live, people are constantly telling each other this, saying,
“All you have to do is go to Family Tree and find your temple names.
Isn’t that awesome that the Church has made it so easy!
They’ve just handed us these names.”
And so the “good news” gets spread around with people
not realizing that it’s actually a misconception.
But the truth is that Family Tree is a wonderful gift that was
given to us by the Church through FamilySearch
as a place to collaborate with other researchers,
a place to track temple work, and where we can add family names.
Once in a while when I talk about the problems
with the data in Family Tree, I have had a couple of people say,
“Wow! It sounds to me like you’re criticizing Family Tree.”
One person even felt like I was criticizing the Prophet because
the Church sponsors Family Tree. But the truth is,
to point out the reality of the data in Family Tree
isn’t a criticism, it’s actually empowering,
because if we understand the data in Family Tree,
we understand better how to use it.
So data issues don’t mean that Family Tree is flawed,
or that the Church did something wrong
by putting this data in Family Tree.
It only looks like a criticism of Family Tree to point out the data
if a person thought the data was supposed to be perfect
and that Family Search had intended it to be perfect.
If you think something’s perfect and then someone says it’s not,
that sounds like criticism and like the program failed.
But if we realize that the purpose of Family Tree
is for us to collaborate, track temple work, and add names,
and it was never meant to be a perfect source of verified names,
then we realize it’s not a criticism of Family Tree.
So the problem isn’t the Family Tree data.
The problem is the misconceptions that we might have about it.
Two more common misconceptions that go a little bit hand in hand --
One of those is that success in family history
means reserving large numbers of names.
Again, this is one of those misconceptions promoted by apps,
at least the way they are used, because so many people use them
to find large numbers of temple names.
Associated with that, is the misconception that family history
is tedious and time-consuming, especially so without an app.
Let’s look a little bit closer at those two misconceptions.
So, does success in family history mean
reserving large numbers of names?
We’ve been taught in conference that’s not the case.
You might remember Elder Scott’s talk where he mentioned that he
didn’t think people would be very happy beyond the veil if someone
reserved a large number of names and kept them in their temple queue.
So that's a problem and the Church has dealt
with that problem by releasing names from
people’s temple queues if they’re older than two years.
So that took care of that problem, but still I hear people saying,
“Wow! I found 400 names!” It almost becomes a matter of pride.
I remember hearing a talk that was given in my stake by a young woman
who had been taught to use a name-finding app to just comb
through family tree and find bunches of names.
So she had used the app. She had gone through and gotten
a couple hundred names and then her sister tried to use the app
to crawl the tree, but the older girl had already reserved the names
after the app had run for a certain period of time.
So the younger sister was really frustrated and discouraged because
she tried to do the same thing her sister did
and wasn’t able to get this huge number of names.
Another problem with this misconception is that it can lead
to cutting corners and not verifying the names.
So people will use the app. They’ll gather hundreds
and in some cases I’ve heard of, people doing thousands of names,
and then they don’t verify them. They either put them in their
temple queue or share them with the temple system,
and then other people end up doing the invalid names,
which is not really fair to them.
So if success in family history doesn’t mean reserving
huge numbers of names, how do we qualify success in family history?
After years of working with people and helping them get started,
I’ve come to believe that success in family history
means a consistent, diligent effort.
In a way, for those of you who are home or visiting teachers,
it’s the same principle. Home and visiting teaching
isn’t a one and done. We don’t just visit a person
once and then say, “Okay, you’re good for life.”
or just think about them once towards the end of the month.
Being a good home or visiting teacher means
consistent, diligent effort on a regular basis.
And I really believe it’s the same in family history.
So, our goal shouldn’t be to be gathering large
numbers of family names, but instead to be
making a consistent, diligent effort.
And this one, oh my goodness, please forgive me because
this is actually one of my greatest concerns,
one that I just wish I could shout from the rooftops
and tell people it’s a myth that family history
is tedious and time-consuming.
Let’s leave the app aside for a minute.
There’s a misconception in the church that family history is
tedious and time-consuming. It’s true that some time periods
and some areas of the world are more difficult than others.
I wish I could tell people that everybody has places
on their line like that, but everybody also has
places on their line that are easier than others.
So family history is not tedious and time-consuming per se.
What is tedious and time-consuming is doing it without the spirit.
Let me give you an example. I was helping my friend Marci
get started with family history quite a few years ago.
I was kind of new to what I was doing and hadn’t fully realized
the power of prayer and the power of following the spirit.
So Marci and I just met in the Family History Center and
sat down to work on her lines. I asked what she wanted to work on.
And she said, “Well, what about this?” So we got in there
and we looked and looked and tried stuff and churned and finally
after 45 minutes or an hour, we both looked at each other and
agreed it wasn't working and didn't feel right.
It was a good learning experience that it took me
that long to realize that it wasn’t working.
And it was tedious. And it was time consuming.
And we both felt that we had not made the best use of our time.
But what was interesting is that after we realized that,
and then we sought the Lord and the inspiration of the Spirit,
we felt prompted to move to a different place
in her family tree and things just opened up.
And it was not tedious, and it was not time-consuming.
So, I really believe it’s a myth, and we do people a disservice
when we teach them family history is tedious and time-consuming.
So, technology can help us. It can take some of the searching.
We can search digital records so much more quickly than if we
had to travel to a court house. But family history only becomes
tedious and time-consuming when we’re not going by the Spirit.
It can be challenging, but it won’t be tedious
and it won’t be this terrible experience.
So, unintended consequences of those misconceptions,
let’s take a look at some of those. Invalid or duplicate temple work.
We’ve talked a little bit about that with the high percentage
of green temples that are invalid.
Another problem that has surfaced within
the last year or so is using a name-finding app to take
names that somebody else is right in the process of reserving.
And then not realizing that names need to be added to Family Tree.
So if we think that Family Tree is this pool of names that
the Church has provided, then we don’t realize that
a lot of names are missing and that we are the ones
who are supposed to be adding those names.
And finally, another unintended consequence is not becoming
self-sufficient in finding names because we don’t think we have to
and so we don't and so we never learn to become self-sufficient.
I want to go into a little bit more detail about this problem
of taking names that other people are currently reserving.
I want to share two experiences that I had on that.
The first is that one of my friends called me almost in tears.
Her voice was teary when she said, “I’ve been working on this
such and such family.” She was pretty new to
family history at the time and she was learning to
do careful verification and find family and
it had just been such a beautiful experience for her to finally
take her own family names to the temple.
So she had found this family and she was very carefully
putting them in family tree, verifying the names,
adding the sources, and so forth and then,
before she could finally make the reservations,
someone else came through with a name-finding app
to reserve those green temples and took the names that
my friend had very carefully researched and verified,
and this other person had not done any
research or verification on the names.
So that’s one experience that I learned first-hand from my friend.
And then I had an experience the other night,
where I was working on a name and I promise you the name had not
been available in the system for more than five minutes,
and I think it was more like about 3 minutes,
when somebody else came through and got the name.
I was in the very process of reserving it for temple work.
Now, it’s important to point out that it is not wrong to reserve a
name added by somebody else. That’s not what I’m saying.
So, my niece, just as an example, she loves doing family history
and the other day she had found some names that were very
difficult to find while she was working on our family.
So she found family names, but she found some other names
in that process, of people that it took her awhile and they were
tricky to find. Well, she made the choice to put
those names in Family Tree because she suspected that it would be very
difficult for somebody else to repeat the research she had done.
So she put the names in Family Tree,
but because they weren’t on her line she did not reserve them.
So if somebody comes along and reserves those names,
that’s why she put them there. So that is not a problem at all.
The problem arises when -- Well, I just have to ask myself,
is it fair to take names that somebody else
has loved and labored over with no more
thought than running an automated name-finding program.
So to avoid this problem, as you’ve probably noticed
if you’ve used one of these name-finding apps,
they don't tell, at least none of the ones that I have tried,
tell you when the name was created.
And so, if a name was created,
and you can tell this is by looking in the change log.
Over on the right-hand side of the Person page,
there’s a link that says “Show All Changes.”
If you click that link and scroll to the bottom,
it will tell you when that name was created.
So you can tell if the name was created within the last week
or maybe even within the last month,
it would be a nice courtesy to contact the person who
contributed that name and say, “I noticed that you
contributed this name. They’re on my family line too,
and I was hoping to reserve some names for the temple.
Are you OK with me reserving these names?”
And who knows, through that process you might meet a
cousin who you can collaborate on research with.
But just doing that resolves the problem of reserving names
that other people are right in the process of reserving.
You can imagine how discouraging that is, especially for a new
family historian, to be right in the process of adding names and
just have those names vanish right before their eyes as
they’re trying to add them. That’s a reason that I recommend
not adding lots of names all at once with a name-finding app,
but rather checking those names and checking to make sure that
somebody else is not already planning to reserve those names.
Another problem is that people get the mindset that family
history means searching in Family Tree for names and
they don’t realize names need to be added.
So I did some checking and got some updated figures.
These population totals used to be higher but current estimates
are that about 100 to 115 billion people have lived on the earth
since the beginning of human history.
Only 1.1 billion people are in Family Tree.
I am not really good at math, but even I can figure out that
this leaves between 99 billion and 114 billion people
that probably need to be added to Family Tree.
Granted there are not records for many people who lived
back through time where either the records have been destroyed
or they didn’t keep them. So there are some of this
large group that we’re not going to be able to find records for,
but there are a surprisingly large number that do have records.
A lot of people still need to be added to Family Tree
and it is an absolute joy. I don’t know that I’ve ever
felt the Spirit stronger than when I find a name
and add it to Family Tree. That person has just gone
from being lost to “getting in the queue”
of having the opportunity to get their temple work done.
Some more unintended consequences --
An unfortunate one that I’ve noticed
is relying on technology instead of the Spirit.
Now let me be careful to explain what I mean there.
One problem is that people trust technology more than
they trust themselves. I’ve been in information technology
for about 20 or 25 years now as a web designer,
as a database person, done different things
with technology and I love technology.
Technology is so miraculous to us
in so many ways that we give it more credit than it deserves.
We think it’s maybe a little more perfect then it is.
Because of that sometimes people will trust the technology
and not trust the Spirit. And usually in a case like that,
it’s not so much that they don’t trust the Spirit,
but more that they doubt the prompting that they’re hearing
because they think, “why am I getting that prompting
because the technology right on my screen that I can trust,
or I feel I can trust, is showing me something different.”
If it’s a toss-up and they’re not quite sure that the Spirit’s
really speaking to them, I’ve seen that a lot of people
will tend to go with technology. Another issue is that technology
can just make the Spirit seem unnecessary.
So it’s not that people are blocking the spirit
or ignoring the spirit, it’s just that if you use
a name-finding app and it presents you with 400 names
of people who apparently need temple work,
then why do you need to follow the Spirit on that,
The names are right I front of you. And I understand that.
I can see why people would. It would not even occur to them
that they would need to follow the Spirit in a case like that
because the names have just been handed to them as they see it.
So another challenge that comes up, another unintended consequence is
that these misconceptions just spread like wildfire.
Because somebody reserves 400 names or 8,000 or whatever,
and they feel that they’ve experienced such great success,
and they can’t wait to share it with everybody else.
Just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen people posting on facebook
and posting on forums, saying, “I’ve found this wonderful app,
and I reserved these hundreds of names and now I’m just so glad
that I did that and you guys should try it too.
So it just spreads because it sounds so fantastic.
And it sounds like it’s going to make a difficult task easier.
The problem is because people have these false expectations,
then when somebody tries to share the facts with them,
the facts are really not welcome. And that also is understandable.
Nobody likes to be disappointed in their expectations.
I’ll give you a couple of examples. There was someone on a public forum
who was talking about gathering hundreds and hundreds of names,
and submitting them to the temple. When a few of us very gently tried
to suggest that a lot of the names gathered that way probably
weren’t valid and at least they should be verified,
the person responded, “Do you mean to tell me that
the Church has spent millions of dollars to make Family Tree
and the names in it aren’t even ready for temple work?”
So that was shock to them and it was a huge disappointment,
because they had been led to believe that all they had to do
was run an app and gather names out of Family Tree.
Another person that I was helping not too long ago,
we sat down and he happily showed me his name-finding results,
where he had around 300 names that the app had found
and he said, “Isn’t this great? I’d like to get these names done.”
And I said, “I’m so glad you found those names.
We really should verify them. There’s a chance that some
of them may not be accurate and it’s always just a good idea
to go through and attach some sources and so forth.”
And he just said, “No, I’d really rather not.
The names look ready to me so I think I’m just going to go ahead.”
Of course as a consultant, you can’t put your foot down and say
“NO! You’re not submitting those names until you’ve verified them.”
We all have our agency and we’re all responsible,
but I have to think that this brother had very good intentions,
I know he had very good intentions, and I have to think that one reason
he felt that it was appropriate was because he had used an app that
presented those names to him as apparently needing temple work,
and it just seemed superfluous that he would need to verify them.
For the last part of these unintended consequences,
I want to talk about some of the more spiritual downsides to using
name-finding apps and gathering large numbers of names.
What I’m noticing among people that have done this is that they
don’t really get to know the people whose names they’re
reserving so their hearts aren’t really turned.
All those people are is names on a list to them.
Don’t get me wrong, they feel a general sense of
“Wow, this is great! Now their temple work can be done.”
That is wonderful but they don’t know anything about these people.
Where did they live? What was their life like?
What did they experience that has contributed to the way I live?
What sacrifices did they make that enabled me
to enjoy the blessings I have today?
So when we don’t dig into those names as we’ve actually been
counselled to do then we lose something really precious and,
in my experience, people’s hearts are not turned by just
submitting names from an app, and especially just by submitting
large numbers of names that aren’t verified.
Another problem that I’ve seen is that an app can encourage
people to have that “one and done” mentality,
like the woman that I mentioned, I don’t think I told this
whole story in this webinar, but I mentioned somebody
who found 8,000 names. She was a sister from California,
who had been taught to use a name-finding app and didn’t realize
that there were some possible problems with it so she had just
reserved all these names and shared them with the temple system
and thought, “OK, that’s done. I’ve fulfilled my obligation
to family history.” What’s interesting about
family history is that, as Boyd K. Packer said,
there is no work that is more spiritually refining.
When we treat it like a “one and done”
I think we miss out on that spiritual refinement.
We don’t have that on-going blessing of learning to
recognize the spirit, of connecting with our ancestors,
of discovering our family stories.
And so, I think we rob ourselves of that blessing when we make
family history into a “one and done” experience.
I debated whether or not to share this next one because once
in a while people have gotten offended at my bringing this up.
But, I’ve experienced it myself and I’ve talked to so many other people
that have experienced it that I think it’s worth mentioning.
And that is, that when we submit invalid names for temple work,
our temple experience is less meaningful.
And I think there’s a good reason for that.
As perhaps you have, I have been in the temple when I have
literally felt the gratitude of the person whose work I was doing.
I could tell they were pleased. I could tell that they accepted
the work and that they were so happy about the chance to progress.
I don’t think I would feel that same joy and gratitude from
somebody if I were doing their work for the 20th time.
I had a friend who had an experience that illustrated
this not too long ago. He had gone to the baptistery
to do some family names that he had carefully
researched and validated and he said that the Spirit was so
strong during that experience. He was just overjoyed to tell that
those people were happy about their temple work.
So after he did the work for his ancestors,
apparently it wasn’t a very busy day so the officiator asked if he
could stay and do other names. And so he agreed gladly and
started doing the names. As he did, he noticed that the
wonderful feelings were no longer present, and that seemed strange.
As they went through the names, what he started to notice is that
there were a couple of them that were apparently the wrong gender.
They were clearly women’s names that were being baptized as men.
And also there were some dates that were suspect and some places,
and things that you could just tell that these names
had not been very carefully researched.
And for my friend, that was just another testimony
that when we are careless with our family names and don’t
properly verify them, and then if we do work and
the names turn out to be invalid, it’s not going to be as meaningful
of a temple experience. Now the reason some people have
expressed concern before, is that they’ve misunderstood me
to say the temple’s not a good experience.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. But what I am saying is that
if we’re careful about doing our research and we find
valid names and we’re guided by the Spirit in doing that work,
then we’re going to have an especially beautiful experience
at the temple which we might not otherwise have.
Let’s return, if you don’t mind, to the misconception that I said
was one of my greatest concerns, and that is that we're teaching
people that family history is tedious and difficult.
And in this particular context people are being taught that
it's tedious and difficult without the app.
The truth is family history is
tedious and difficult without the Spirit.
What I’d like to do now is show you an alternative
approach to using name finding apps,
especially to find large numbers of names.
A little while ago, the Church did some research
and I learned about this in a presentation that I attended
by a brother named Mike Sandberg who works for family search.
He said that the Church had done research on people
who were not submitting any temple names at all
and suddenly they went to submitting names regularly.
So naturally, the Church had a burning question.
How did they make the transition? What enabled them to go from
not submitting any names at all to successfully submitting
temple names regularly? What they found out
was very interesting. 85% of those who made this
transition had a helper and 65% of them got help multiple times.
So the Church discovered that having a person to help or mentor
somebody new to family history was the key to success.
If this is sounding familiar to any of you, you will realize
that this became the basis for the Church’s Find-Take-Teach program.
Find-Take-Teach is a Spirit-led, one-on-one effort
where help is given by a person who pays the price
to know how to help that person by the Spirit.
Let me go ahead and show you in a little more detail
why this approach works. I’m simplifying this.
If you want more information you can look on FamilySearch.org.
They’ve got a complete description of it.
But very simply, the helper and the patron both pray for guidance
and then the helper prepares a personalized lesson by the Spirit.
And during this lesson, also by the Spirit,
they find a starting place for this person
or they find valid temple names for the person.
Finally, when they get together, the helper guides the patron
in a one-on-one setting to reserve those temple names.
I want to show you as a person who has responsibility currently for
helping and mentoring people, I want to show you the process
that I go through to find a good starting place when I’m working
with somebody in a Find-Take-Teach experience.
This is not the only way to do it. It’s the way that works best for me
and I have other friends that are equally successful in using
different approaches but I can speak to what works for me.
I hope that this example might be helpful to you
in finding your own best approach. So the first, most important thing
for me is that I have to go some place quiet where I can
hear the Spirit in preparing this Find-Take-Teach experience.
I can’t be where I’m distracted. I can’t be where I feel pressured.
I have to be in a place where I can truly feel
the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.
So, I make those arrangements, whatever it takes.
In one of my classes a sister said that she can’t do it at home.
There’s just no way, even in the bathroom
it’s like knock, knock, knock “Mom! Are you in there?”
So what she does is she goes to the public library
where people are supposed to be quiet.
And so that place works for her. You might find a different quiet
place that works for you. But whatever you do,
find a place where you can be in tune with the Spirit.
And then, I bring up the Fan Chart, that’s my favorite place to work.
And I listen for what I call “heart tugs” which are
spiritual promptings to me that somebody is wanting
their temple work to be done. So here’s an example.
I had offered to help a sister at the MTC as part of a
Find-Take-Teach experience there. This sister had a very full tree
and she wasn’t convinced that we would be able to find anything.
So I asked for her helper number.
The place where we were working that Sunday in the MTC was very
noisy and I knew that it was not a good place for me to
really hear the Spirit and find a good starting place.
I asked for her helper number and we arranged to meet the following week.
And I went to a place where I could listen to the Spirit.
As I did, I prayed sincerely, and I had asked her to pray with me.
And so, I looked at the fan chart and as I pondered and looked and
clicked on a few different names, I found that I was drawn to this
name of Abraham Chadwick. So I thought, "OK, I’ll follow that
prompting and I will check Abraham’s
Person page and see what’s going on there."
Well, as my friend mentioned, he had done a lot.
As it turned out, and I had no way of knowing this of course,
he was the first member of their family to join the Church.
So as I looked here and read his personal history and clicked
on his wives’ names and his children’s names,
sure enough all their work was done and it was evident
that he was a good, faithful man from reading his testimony.
So I thought, "Wow, this might be harder than I thought."
But I continued to pray and ask the Spirit for guidance to be led
to that place where the Spirit wanted me to work
for my dear sister in the MTC. And as I did, again just another
line-upon-line gentle prompting, I found that I was
led to this name of Sarah Ann Chadwick.
So I looked at that and this is what I found.
She had a husband, George Bradbury, and they had six kids.
And all their work was done too, so I’m so grateful that by this
point I had learned better how to recognize the Spirit,
because in my younger days I might have doubted myself and just said,
“Wow, I’ve been digging around here and I’m not finding anything so that
might not really have been the Spirit.”
I might have questioned myself. But because I had, fortunately,
tried really hard to grow in my ability, and I’m far from perfect,
but I’d really tried to grow in my ability to hear the Spirit,
I trusted these promptings. I thought, “I’m gonna keep going.
I am not sure why ‘cause this isn’t looking too good,
but I’m gonna keep trying.” So I clicked on the first name of
their first son and that’s when I started to feel that I was going
the right direction. And so the first thing that caught
my attention was that Samuel’s wife didn’t even have a last name.
So that indicated more research definitely needed to be done.
And I noticed that they didn’t have many children.
Back in the 1800’s, most families had a large number of children.
With just a little bit of research, it wasn’t like I took days and days,
in fact I don’t think it was even hours,
it was just a little quick checking in Ancestry and FamilySearch
historical records. It didn’t take long to discover
that Samuel and Kate were missing four children from Family Tree.
These children were not there and needed to be added so that their
temple work could be done. And then I thought,
“OK, that is why I got that prompting.”
I think the reason I was prompted to start with Abraham was that if
I got a prompting like suppose that the name Samuel Bradbury
came into my mind, I would not have a clue what to do with it.
And so the Spirit led me along a path where I could see how this
family first got involved with the Church and then how these
people who needed their ordinances were related to that first convert.
So this was just a wonderful, beautiful experience in
finding these names. Also, as I did more research,
I found in the 1911 census that Kate had died and so Samuel had
remarried and his second wife Ada Sarah was not in
Family Tree either, and her temple work needed to be done.
So just from following that prompting, I was able to find and
verify these five names and pass those on to the sister in the MTC
so that she could get that temple work done.
Another example on this family, was that when I looked at Hannah,
Samuel’s younger sister, she did not have a spouse.
Again, just a little bit of research.
This wasn’t hours of looking through court records or something,
this was doing a search on Ancestry in available censuses.
In just a short period of time I discovered that at one point
Hannah had been living with her mother.
And so there was the definite proof there that this really was my
Hannah that I was looking for, and found out that she did have a
husband and they had three children together.
Right there were four more names, four valid names that needed
to be added to Family Tree. So that is an example of how
to follow the Spirit to find a place to work in Family Tree.
But I was mentioning this to a dear sister in my stake who I was
helping get started with family history and this is what she said,
“I don’t think I’m that good at hearing the Spirit.”
I have to tell you something about this sister.
She is amazing! She serves people. She’s wonderful.
I don’t think she was giving herself enough credit.
But, I think all of us have felt that kind of sense of inadequacy.
I know I certainly did, especially when I was first starting to really
try to follow the Spirit in family history.
Fortunately we all learn to hear the Spirit line upon line.
Wherever you are in learning to follow the Spirit,
wherever I am, that’s a place to start growing from.
In fact the only place we can start growing from is where we are.
So we all learn to hear the Spirit line upon line,
and to me that is such good news, because that’s doable.
I can do that. I can grow line upon line.
And the wonderful thing I that have found about family history,
and to me it’s one of its greatest, greatest blessings is that it is
simply one of the best tutorials in learning to hear the Spirit.
I could give you dozens of examples on this, but I won’t.
I’ve got a whole other webinar on that and I’ll show you the
link at the end of this one and you can watch that if you'd like.
I have found as I listen to the Spirit in doing family history,
I’ve learned more about how the Spirit speaks to me and that
knowledge has grown over the years as I continue to hear promptings
and discern then correctly, and sometimes not correctly.
I learn from making mistakes too. But the point that I wanted to
make is that family history is one of the very best
tutorials in learning to hear the Spirit.
And if we don’t try to follow the Spirit in family history then we
lose that great opportunity of refining our ability to hear.
Hearing the Spirit better brings blessings in all areas of our lives.
I love this quote by Joseph Smith, and it’s something that I have
experienced doing family history. And that is that a person may
profit by noticing the first intimation (or hint)
of the spirit of revelation. It may give you sudden strokes
of ideas like call so and so, or sit here at this meeting
because you don’t know this but you’re going to find somebody
to help you with temple names, or there’s a mistake in your record,
go back and check it. So it may give you these sudden
strokes of ideas so that by noticing it you find it fulfilled.
So you find that prompting you got was a real
prompting because whatever it told you about was true.
So you find it fulfilled the same day or soon
and thus by learning the Spirit of God and understanding it,
you may grow into the principle of revelation.
And it’s my testimony that this is absolutely true and that doing
family history gives you the opportunity
to grow in hearing revelation in this way.
So, closing thoughts. This is something that comes up
from time to time when we talk about the problems with
misusing name-finding apps. So the person will say,
“But, the app I’m using is certified by FamilySearch.
Doesn’t that mean that it finds valid names?”
And that’s understandable why people would think that because
the word “certified” sounds really official, doesn’t it.
It sounds like there’s some type of guarantee on the app
that it’s going to perform as I expect it to.
But, that’s actually not the case. The short answer is no,
being certified doesn’t guarantee finding valid names.
And, in fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with valid names.
Let’s take a look at what FamilySearch certification means.
This is a direct quote from the FamilySearch certification site.
The reason most people probably don’t read this is that it’s
geared towards developers. So most of us don’t have any
reason to go out to this site. But, listen to what it says.
The designation is simply used to identify software applications
that FamilySearch believes to be generally compatible with
FamilySearch or its application programming interfaces,
which is basically the way the programs talk to each other.
So FamilySearch believes that this app is generally compatible
but FamilySearch takes no responsibility and is no way
liable for any such application. Accordingly, FamilySearch in no way
warrants that these applications will function as intended or that
they are free from harmful or undesirable aspects
or free from errors. So, the reason I bring this up
is just to help us understand that to say an app is FamilySearch
certified is a wonderful thing and it does mean something specific.
It means that you can generally count on it to work correctly with
the FamilySearch.org website, but it does not guarantee anything
about the app being used in a certain way, or misused, or any
problem that result from its use. Here’s another thing that I hear
sometimes in talking with a couple of different app developers or
reading their websites. They say, “I’m an app developer
and my app warns people that they should research the names that
they find so isn’t that enough?” You would hope that it would be.
You would hope that everybody reads the fine print,
but my own experience is that I don’t always read the fine print.
Sometimes if I’m in a hurry I just glance at it and think
"I don't have time for this." My experience is most people don't
read the warnings not only for these apps but for anything.
In fact, I’ll give you an example. The other day I was helping
somebody in a Find-Take-Teach experience and several warnings
came up during the process of our working together and
the person I was helping just clicked right past the warnings.
And the sense that I got was that they felt that they would not
have understood the warnings anyway so why bother to read them.
So maybe it was a little sense of technophobia or inadequacy or
whatever, but for whatever reason, most people don’t read the warnings
on these apps or anyplace else. I’ve also found that the few people
who read the warnings don’t really understand how to apply it because
often the main users of name-finding apps are people
who are just getting started in family history and
somebody has told them about the app and said this is a
quick and easy way to find temple names.
So they get to the app, and if they read the warning,
they go, “Oh, Okay, I’ll research, whatever that means.”
And so they reserve their hundred names, or whatever,
and then they look at the list of a hundred and they go,
“Well, looks fine to me. I’m not really sure what I’m
looking for but I don’t see any problems so I guess I’ll go ahead.”
And we can’t fault people for that because if they’re just
getting started and they don’t understand, then they’re doing
their best to follow the warning but they didn’t really understand
what the app developer meant by the warning.
So, that’s an example of how just putting a warning on an app doesn’t
really help solve the problem of the app being misused to find
invalid names or large numbers of names.
So at this point you might be asking yourself,
what if I submitted a lot of names like the dear sister in California
that has submitted 8,000 names gathered with a name-finding app?
Well, if the names are in your reservation list, verify them.
You’ve got them. There's no reason to not verify them.
What that means is not just kind of looking at them and going
“Well, I don’t see any problems,” but rather going back and verifying
is the vital information correct? Is it supported by sources?
Are the relationships correct? Are there any obvious problems
like the mom having kids when she’s age four?
So verifying those names,
you can’t really verify names en masse.
You need to verify them individually,
just like when the Savior had the individuals come to him.
When he appeared in the Americas, they came one by one.
We also need to verify names one by one
and make sure that they’re correct.
So that, of course, is not necessarily a short process,
especially if you have 8,000 names in your temple queue.
So if it’s going to take longer than two years before the names
will be released by the Church, then you probably would want to
put those names back in FamilySearch and let other people
go ahead and reserve them and hopefully they would reserve
just a few and they would carefully verify them.
If the ordinances are already done,
don’t worry about it. Don’t beat yourself up.
I know of people who have beat themselves up.
Like a sister I’m aware of who found out that she had,
after reserving green temple names and doing about 30 ordinances,
a cousin contacted her and said, “Did you realize you just did
all this duplicate work? Those names were done years ago.
And she was so hurt and so frustrated and so disappointed
because she had been told that the right thing to do was just gather
these green names and that she didn’t need to verify them.
So she was so hurt and disappointed that she exclaimed,
“I am never doing family history again!”
Now, hopefully after she thought about it she changed her mind.
That was hopefully just said in the disappointment of the moment,
but that’s what we don’t want to do is beat ourselves up.
If you’ve done some of these names, especially if you did them with
the best of intentions, consider it a learning
experience and just say, “Okay, that’s water under the bridge.
Going forward I’ll know better what to do.”
And, you can help people that you talk to be aware of these problems
so that they don’t run into the same types of issues.
Your next question might be, are you saying that I should
never use a name-finding app? No, I’m not saying that,
because it is possible to use name- finding apps to find valid names.
It's just that in my experience, and this is anecdotal,
so this is just my experience as a Stake Temple and
Family History Consultant and a ward consultant
in a number of different wards, it’s been my experience
that they usually aren’t used to find valid names.
Most of the time the people who are using them have been
told that it’s a fast and easy way to find
temple names and they’re not told about verification.
So, if I use a name finding app, how can I find valid names?
You can! So here are some tips for finding valid names
with name-finding apps. First of all, most importantly,
seek the guidance of the Spirit. I know a woman who started to use
a name-finding app and the Spirit told her not to.
Now that was specifically for her situation.
That should not be generalized to anybody else
in any other situation. That was just in hers.
But, she was told not to and if she had disobeyed
the Spirit, then that would have been a mistake for her.
So you want to seek the guidance of the Spirit
in using the name-finding apps, and if you’re warned
not to use them, then don’t. On the other hand, if you’re
told to use them by a definite spiritual prompting then do.
Verify each and every name carefully that you find.
So verify the vital information, the relationships,
check for duplicates, add sources, make sure the vital information
agrees with the sources. And here a tip is to use
one or more names as a starting point to find and add more names.
So you can find, maybe a couple of names using a name-finding app
and then go back to Family Tree and thoroughly research those names and
see if anybody’s missing, kind of as we did in the example
that I showed you of the Find- Take-Teach experience in the MTC.
And then finally, I found that it really helps to work
on one family at a time, rather than a large list of random names.
The reason it’s helpful to work on one family at a time is that you
get to know that family, you become familiar with
the place that they lived, with what they did for a living,
with how many children they had, with when their kids left home
and got married, and so forth. And so, as you follow
this family through time, as you find their birth records,
their census records, their death records,
all those different things that help you know that family,
then you’re able to correctly find the information for them,
validate those names and add them to Family Tree.
And I felt so much more comfortable working in
family units to add names to Family Tree rather than
just working from a mass list of random names that are just in
whatever order they were found by the name-finding app.
So, therefore what? Do you remember President Packer
used to say this a lot, so what are the takeaways that
I hope we’ll get from this webinar? Well, if you are a user
of a name-finding app, the takeaways are
I hope that you would be aware of the potential problems
that we’ve talked about today and also that you’d help others
be aware because there’s so many misconceptions going around,
that you would use these apps as guided by the Spirit,
that you would remember that there are so many names
that still need to be added to Family Tree,
that you would realize that a good helper can help you
in a way that an app can’t, and that you would remember
that technology doesn’t replace thought, research, or the Spirit.
As amazing as technology is, it’s not perfect and we need
to use it as a tool and as a companion to our
spiritual efforts but not as a replacement for them.
If you are a developer, what would I hope that
you would take away from this webinar today?
I would love to see app developers educate people about
the data in Family Tree to combat those misconceptions.
Again, I don’t think most developers are setting out
to tell people wrong facts about the data in Family Tree.
They’re not meaning to communicate misconceptions,
but users pick them up anyway, especially when they’re shared
word of mouth from user to user or posted on Facebook or wherever.
So app developers could do a huge favor to users
by educating them about the data in Family Tree.
Also, teach people that Family Tree is not meant
to be a primary source for finding names.
Yes, there are some great, valid green temple names in Family Tree,
but Family Tree was never intended to be a primary source of temple
names so we don’t have to find our own family or do our own research.
I would love it if app developers did not give users the impression
that family history without the app is difficult and tedious.
Again, family history is only difficult and tedious
if we don’t have the Spirit. Let me take that back on difficult.
There can be challenges, especially in some time periods
and some places, but what I found is that if you follow the Spirit,
you’ll be led to solve those problems and there’s a
sense of joy and it’s not difficult in a horrible way.
It’s difficult in a challenging and invigorating way.
So, I would love for this misconception to be done
away with in the Church, that family history is synonymous
with difficult and tedious. I would also love it if apps
put caps on the number of names that they found.
I’m aware of some that do, but to my understanding,
there are some that don’t, that allow users to just grab
huge numbers of names and submit them for temple work.
I was talking with some friends the other day about the problems
that we continue to see with people submitting large numbers of invalid
names using name-finding apps and we would love it if
there was some kind of feature that would allow
people to clean up those large numbers of the invalid names
that have been submitted, whether it was some
super duplicate search or something, I don’t know.
This was on our wish list. We thought it would be
so wonderful if there was some way to clean up
those many invalid names that have been submitted.
I would like to close with a quote from David Rancher,
who is currently the chief genealogical officer
at FamilySearch. He said, “I love my computer.
I love it for everything it can do for me,
but the computer is not what turns my heart.
What turns my heart are the experiences and the impressions
I have from the Spirit and the things that I know and understand.
So that concludes our webinar for today.
I wanted to share with you those promised additional resources.
The first one is a list of other webinars that you can get on this
link down at the bottom and they are webinars that go into
more detail about what we’ve talked about today.
Many times people use name-finding apps because they’ve been told that
it is the only way to find success as a beginner.
And, unfortunately, I’ve even seen this attitude
among consultants where they will say it is too hard
to teach a beginner to do careful family history.
They’re going to get discouraged and they won’t do it.
And so therefore I have to teach them to use the name-finding app.
Well of course, Find-Take-Teach has turned that on its head.
As a helper prepares a Spirit-led Find-Take-Teach experience
to find valid names, beginners do learn to do valid family history.
So that first webinar kind of touches on that subject.
The second one dives more into using the Holy Ghost
in family history, duplicates in Family Tree, obviously.
And then the last one goes into a lot more detail on understanding
the data in Family Tree, where it came from and
what some of the additional challenges are with it.
And then lastly, I want to recommend to you
this amazing book that I just love. It’s available at Deseret Book.
It’s called "Hearts Turned to the Fathers,"
and it’s a history of family history since the restoration.
So it starts out from the beginning of the
restored gospel to about the 1990’s when the book was
published and when FamilySearch was just gaining traction.
So if you love family history I think you would love this book.
So thank you everybody for your time and attention today
and I hope that this webinar is helpful to you,
hope that it makes your family history more meaningful
and more successful. Thank you.
(Sean) Okay thank you so much to Kathryn for that wonderful
presentation. I would just like to remind everybody that these
webinars will be uploaded onto YouTube and our channel name
is BYU Family History Library. If you could, before you leave
the webinar today, look at the different polls that we have
down at the bottom of the screen.
We’d love to hear any feedback that you have or suggestions
to different topics that you’d like us to cover in the future.
That would be very helpful for us and our different presenters.
And again, thanks to Kathryn for that wonderful presentation today
and we hope to see you guys at our next webinar. Alright, Bye.