Accuracy vs. Good Experience: What to Do if You Have Many Names in Your Family Tree

When I help people at my local family history center, I often encounter people who have very full family trees, and I've been at a loss for how to help them find a name to take to the temple. The church has made some excellent materials explaining the basics of descendancy research, but what I couldn't find was any explanation of what to do if there were errors on those lines. When I started doing family history I really didn't expect to ever find people who needed temple work, so I made it my project to add life histories and photos and make sure my ancestors' entries on Family Search were accurate, complete, and cleaned up. It took me a few years of work before I was able to do descendancy research and find family names, and that didn't really bother me. And as annoying as the errors and messes are, I view them as a challenge and I find it fulfilling to make those parts of the tree accurate again.

But I realize that I'm probably the anomaly. I didn't want to intimidate people who are new at family history by telling them they would have to do all this before they could find family names. However, I also wasn't sure if it was right to encourage people to do temple work for someone when they haven't verified that they're actually related to that person. So for months I've been left feeling uncertain how to teach people with full trees.

Next month my stake is hosting a Family Discovery Day, and I've been asked to teach a class for people with many names in their tree. I was looking at the church's suggested lesson outline and found this:

"Explain that while searching for these icons class members may come across data problems, missing sources, or possible duplicates. Encourage class members to skip these issues and come back once they have more experience in searching records or ask for help from other family members or friends who do."

So I guess that's my answer. And in a lot of ways it makes sense. Yes, it grates on my organized side that wants everyone to do it the way I did, but for inexperienced genealogists that's going to be really intimidating and drive them away. Considering that only about 5% of Latter-Day Saints are involved in family history, my guess is that the church is just trying to get more people to do it. If a person can have a good experience finding a name and doing that person's work, they are more likely to come back and do more, and this will eventually lead to them getting more experience. Then they can help with cleaning up the data errors if they feel led to do it. Plus they'll hopefully tell family and friends how to do it too so that more people will give it a try. So at this point the goal is probably just to get people to try.