Saturday, March 13, 2010

New Family Search Classes at Salt Lake City Family History Library

This week I completed the four-part series of classes on New Family Search at the Family History Libary. Sister Catherine Anderegg is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot. I will not fully know the software until I work with it more. But I feel confident enough now to keep working in it and to start teaching it to others. I hope I can motivate our ward members to sign up and start working in New Family Search as well as in Family Search Indexing.

My opinion of New Family Search is that it is a good thing. There are a lot of problems presently but after the problems are worked out we will have achieved three important things.

1. There will be a mostly accurate, evidence-based database of our ancestors on the Internet.
2.  Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be able to participate in Family History and perform temple ordinances for their ancestors without having to adopt the expensive time-consuming hobby of being genealogists.
3. Families will be able to learn about their ancestors and they will be able to co-ordinate their research and temple work with extended family members which will bring everyone closer together.