Michael Ritchey

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Everything posted by Michael Ritchey

  1. Yah, that was good for a belly laugh. I guarantee they'll be replacing that calling with an equivalent relating to family history. (Not that I've heard any rumblings around the office or anything....)
  2. I've worked in management for FamilySearch since 2003. Since bhackett announced that he is a Church Service Missionary at FamilySearch, I am concerned that anyone who reads his posts might think that his method of submitting ordinances to the temple in batches of hundreds at a time is in any way aligned with the guidelines, goals, or practices of FamilySearch. It is not. Submitting ordinances hundreds at a time completely misses the whole spirit of temple and family history work. It is akin to paying your tithing because you think God is short on cash. It's like doing your daily scripture studies in your car during your commute listening to an audio recording set at 5x normal talking speed so you can say you studied 30 chapters a day. It's a cheap shortcut -- a counterfeit activity that not only fails to identify real ancestors a high percentage of the time, but also bypasses the equally important and heart-turning praying, pondering, dreaming, and receiving of personal revelation and guidance that Heavenly Father is trying to help us grow into. Except it's worse than that. When you cheapen your scripture studies, you hurt only yourself. By contrast, when you submit ordinances for a bunch of data clusters that aren't really verified people -- and then you share those ordinances with the temple because there's no way you can do them all yourself -- you waste the lion's share of the temple trip of someone who may have spent a round trip of 7 hours to get to the temple. And in performing that ordinance for that non-person -- or that person whose duplicate the software overlooked because you didn't clean up the data first -- templegoers necessarily miss out on doing ordinances for real, verified people waiting on the other side. There is no lazy man's way to do this the right way. There are great tools, including partner tools, that can efficiently show us where opportunities lie. But after we've used those tools to find the opportunities, we need to look at each one and really examine that data cluster to see if it's actually an ancestor we should discover, gather, and connect.
  3. I work for FamilySearch. You need to add parents' parents, who will hopefully already be on the Tree. If they are, they'll probably already be connected to a large family tree of ancestors. If you email me at ritcheymt aaat familysearch.org, I can send you a Helper invite, become your Helper on the Tree just as your local Family History Consultant would, and help you work this out in a matter of minutes. Otherwise, I'd recommend you reach out to your ward Temple and Family History Consultant, who is called to help with this. Your High Priest Group Leader is also called to help with this. I love helping folks with this stuff, though, so I'd be happy to help you. - Mike