Why I'm Committed to Using Family Search

I've talked to several people who tell me they've stopped putting their genealogy on Family Search because they don't like other people changing it. Many of these are people who have done genealogy their entire life and spent countless hours reading microfilm, looking through books in courthouse basements, and searching cemeteries to find the information they need. Then they get onto Family Search and find that after all that hard work somebody added incorrect children or spouses or merged their great-great grandfather with someone completely different.

I get it. I'm currently watching 309 people on Family Search and I know to some people that number is low. Lately my Weekly Changes emails from Family Search tend to have over 100 changes that I have to verify, and usually there are at least a few merges or added relationships that I have to check and fix. I know several people in my family deal with this too.

But I won't stop using Family Search. I'm committed to it, and here's why:

• It's reducing duplicate temple work. Before the unified family tree, you had to look people up on the Temple Ready discs, which had to be updated and sent to family history centers periodically and missed a lot of duplicates. With the Possible Duplicates feature and the Find feature it's a much faster and more effective process to look for duplicates and avoid doing someone's temple work unnecessarily.
• It connects distant relatives, making it possible for them to share information as well as inherited items or pictures. One of my favorite things is to look at one of my ancestors and find that someone uploaded a photo or diary. I have even been able to share audio files of my grandfather (who I never met) singing to my mom.
• Having a unified family tree makes it so that I don't have to do all the research from scratch. If another relative has already done all that research and shared in on Family Search, I can look through the information they've added to see if it seems right, enjoy any memories that have been shared, and move on. That frees me to work on other people who haven't been researched yet.
• It's an efficient way to reserve temple work and check to make sure the ordinances were recorded properly. It's also an efficient way to share ordinance cards with my family.
• While the interface isn't perfect (I would like to see ways to tag sources to events other than birth, christening, death, and burial), for the most part I really like the program and enjoy using it. I love that we can view our trees in several different ways (fan chart, vertical, horizontal, descendancy) and add sources with explanations.
• Because the tree is open for editing, I can quickly make changes instead of having to call church officials or submit dispute forms. This saves me a lot of time and it also means that people who would have to process disputes have more time to spend elsewhere.
• Family Search Family Tree has made it possible like never before for descendancy research to be done. Previously this was just too complicated because you had to check for ordinances on Temple Ready, so we focused on tracing our own ancestors, which is why a lot of us descendants of pioneers thought our genealogy was all done. Now the potential for temple work on my family tree is enormous.
• By sharing my research on Family Search I get access to Family Search's record hints, which are getting more accurate all the time. This saves me a lot of time because I can find a lot of information without even having to do a search and look through results.
• Having my family history on Family Search makes it more likely that all the research I have done will be preserved for future generations. How many people do you know who have everything saved in boxes and boxes of notebooks or on old floppy disks? Are their descendants going to happily sort through all that when they inherit it, or will they be apathetic about it?
• If not me, then who? I do good research and I am experienced enough with the program that I can make good contributions and I can work through the process of fixing the complicated messes. If all the good researchers abandon the program it will just descend into chaos. I stay because I feel that I've been called to contribute and especially to help deal with the messes and inaccuracies.
• Many of the features on Family Search have made family history work much more efficient, which means we find temple opportunities much more quickly as well. In fact, the church no longer has to rely on extraction work at all because there are enough people submitting names for the temple to fulfill all the temples' needs. And with over 150 temples throughout the world, that means that God is truly hastening the work of redeeming the dead!
• In Doctrine and Covenants 128:24, it says: "Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation." I suspect that this "book" will be the unified family tree on Family Search. Personally I want to be able to say that I did what I could to contribute to it!