Genealogy from the perspective of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, LDS)

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Massive Sealing Duplication Shows Up on FamilySearch Family Tree

[Please Note: There are quite a few valuable comments to this post. You should take some time to read them.]

Today, 24 March 2016, a massive number of duplicate child to sealing green Temple icons showed up on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. These are almost uniformly duplicate ordinance "opportunities" that are for children who died young and were "born in the covenant." This is one of the strangest duplications that have occurred so far with the Family Tree. I suggest that those who recognize that these children do not need duplicate ordinances quickly reserve the ordinance of sealing so the sealings are not done for those who do not legitimately need them.

You might was to pass this along to any interested members.

15 comments:

  1. FamilySearch released the ordinances that were marked as "completed" if they were "patron opinion ordinances", not valid, verified ordinance dates from either Membership or Temple records. One will need to check each person to see if there are any duplicate records that need to be merged and perhaps may need to complete any ordinances that were not really previously verified ordinances. You could make a case if you have documentation of a completed ordinance from either a membership record or temple record.

    So far I have seen one baptism and confirmation that have showed up "green temple" - before listed as completed.

    If the ordinances were done before a certain date, the temple file may list them as "completed". Those will still show in Family Tree as completed (without a date) because they came from the temple file that way. However if they were entered in nFS or earlier, by a patron as "completed", they are considered not complete and are showing up for cleaning up, merging, and submitting for ordinance completion.

    At least this is how I understand what has taken place. I was expecting this about 10 days ago.

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    1. Hi Amy,
      What you say is likely very accurate, but that is not what we are seeing. These are children that are the children of members who were married in the Temples. The children would not have been marked as completed because they were marked previously as BIC. There are no duplicates here that can be detected by the system. Whatever you were expecting is not what actually has happened. Thanks for your comment however, it will make us look further than we otherwise would have. I am seeing dozens of new green Temple icons with just my first looks.

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  2. So.... what are we supposed to do? Do the work again? Try to merge with a completed/dated record? As if we don't have a zillion other things to do. This is indeed our Pioneer Task. In another decade, all these freaky nFS and other issues will be cleaned up by us Pioneers, and our children and grands will have it easy peasy.

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    Replies
    1. You wish it is more likely that they will have their own challenges.

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  3. What a mess. Today I am seeing children that were baptized when they were 8 with green temples.

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  4. I do not see any green temple icons in any of the families of my direct line ancestors. most of the ones who died young but born in the covenant are listed as "Sealing to parents completed (born in covenant)." The others had sealings done for them when older siblings were born in covenant but none more recently that 1995.

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  5. Heeeeereee we go again! Hunting them down and get the records resolved quickly.

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  6. If we are to remember that our efforts are to be directed toward our own ancestors and their descendants and to turn our hearts toward them, we cannot just scoop up their names en masse and submit them for temple work with no thought as to whether the connections that document them as "ours" are true.

    We are also given tools that show some of the data may be in error. It seems to be a mistake to pass those questions up, to follow the spurious pedigree back in time, and rush to do the temple work for everyone (or to share those masses of names with the temple) without leaving any for the rest of their descendants who come upon these names a second too slow to reserve them to enrich our own temple experience.

    We must make some effort to straighten out our pedigree lines and document them to show our love for our ancestors and all their descendants, even living ones who may also wish to participate in this labor of love.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the very thoughtful and considerate comment.

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  7. In the past, New FamilySearch considered unofficial ordinances submitted by patrons from Ancestral File and Pedigree Resource File. This was turned off in preparation to move to a higher performing back end called Tree Foundation (TF). The TF database will not have any of these patron submitted ordinances and will only consider the ordinances from membership and the official temple database. So if a sealing was done, but no longer shows in the tree, then it means that the official ordinance was not properly recorded in the temple or membership databases and should be performed again to ensure that we have an official temple ordinance record backing every ordinance in the tree or a request sent to membership to fix a born in covenant flag.

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  8. FYI, it appears at the moment that by making sure the relationship type to each parent is Biological, that BIC correctly appears. That may change one way or another as this issue is addressed. I just mention that as a current workaround for the issue.

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    Replies
    1. A very good and very valuable point. Thank you very much.

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  9. Like others I have found some relatives that are missing in FT that are in the old DOS ordinance database. Will the changes fix this problem eventually?

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  10. Weirdest for me is that half the children show B.I.C. and half don't and show SP needed. The SS ordinances covers all children in a family.

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  11. I checked the relationship type for the children I see needing SP, and they are listed as biological. So ??? that doesn't seem to work here either for all.

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