By Danielle Ellis
“Stand close together and lift where we stand,” counseled President Dieter F. Uctdorf in an address to the priesthood brethren in the October 2008 general conference. Although President Uctdorf’s counsel applies to many settings within the Church and our lives, I want to share the startling results I have experienced applying this counsel to family history.

One of the three main missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is to redeem the dead. Specifically, we are to seek after our own deceased family members in order that we may perform saving ordinances for them in the Lord’s Holy Temples. And so it is that throughout the Church, and throughout the world, some member of every extended family becomes the family historian.

I am fortunate enough to have these people on both sides of my family. These generous souls did their best to find and preserve family names, birth and death dates, marriages, and children. Which leaves me, the only member of the Church, with a lot of temple work to do.

Or so I thought. I began working on one part of my family tree, carefully preserved by my grandfather. As I worked through the pages of his books, the family tree grew until I had over three hundred names on this one branch. I wondered how I could ever get that much temple work done in the next few months, even with the help of ward and stake members.

Armed with plenty of family info, I logged onto new.familysearch.org. What I found simply shocked me: with the exception of a few names, all the temple work was done! President Uctdorf’s counsel came to mind as I reveled in my discovery.

I searched for clues as to how the names found their ways to the temples. Some came from submissions by far-flung family members.
Some came from name extraction programs. But the bottom line is that all of these hundreds of people have received temple ordinances. Rather than having to do all the work by myself, I am only adding in spouses and children who escaped previous researchers.

I also discovered a wonderful truth about doing family history for temple work in the age of massive databases: there are plenty of family members whose ordinances have been done, but they need to be properly linked. When a researcher finds a name through county court records, they may have only a few pieces of information, such as names, a marriage date, and the place of the event. They have no way to know how many children were born to that couple, or where those people died.

In the pre-database days, the next researcher who indexed obituaries or church records or census records didn’t know about the previous records, so temple work was duplicated. Those people didn’t know about the home family historians, and so temple work might be duplicated again.

What that meant for me, going into the new.familysearch.org site was that my family lines didn’t automatically appear. But when I went to add a father or mother, spouse or children, I would search for the name, and very often find many duplicates. Once I confirmed that the database match was my ancestor, I would link them into their proper place in the chain, and merge all the duplicates, thus linking all the data on that person into one file.

So my greatest discovery was that doing family history and temple work in the database age is as much database work as it is temple ordinances. And even a busy mother can squeeze in some time on a database every day. More to the point, at this critical hour, we must focus our resources on finding ancestors whose work still needs to be done, rather than doing duplicate temple work. And so I say, it’s not just lifting where we stand; we can lift where we sit—at our computers—while we link our generations together through saving ordinances.