Hope Chest app?


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Have any of you heard of or used the Hope Chest extension for Chrome? It's to be used with FamilySearch, and digs through your tree to find specific things (like names needing ordinances, or records needing more information). It's a $10 lifetime fee for it to do anything FamilySearch won't do. I just started playing with it, and it has found several names needing work already. It seems to be a pretty cool app.

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  • 1 year later...

Our ward has been using Hope Chest for a couple of years now to submit and/or bring names to the temple.  Tens of thousands of names have been submitted by some members.  We teach its use during our Sunday second hour temple and family history jump-start course.  It has helped us provide more than 300 times the names submitted for temple work than all the other wards in our stake combined.  New members find great excitement in finding cousins already in FamilySearch that they can do baptisms for.  Even our youth program have 8 year old and above children submitting hundreds of names to the temple.

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Crashes?  It will stop but not after producing 3 to 4 hundred names.  That's because Chrome gives limited memory to an attached application.  I'll take a look at Take a Name.  Thanks for your comments.

I guess I had used Take A Name before.  It was loaded on my Android phone.  I went back to look at it and find why I wasn't using it.  I did a search that lasted about 15 minutes.  It gave me 3 names with reservations that I requested.  Unfortunately it didn't reserve the SP ordinance on any of them.  It also gave me 97 names that are already reserved! (not sure why).  It will take me forever to generate any volume of names if I have to re-search every 15 minutes.  I ran a search again and got 0 names.  Not very useful.

I have generated more than 210,000 ordinance reservations with Hope Chest.  I appreciate your opinion.  Our objectives are probably different.  Thanks. 

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I think the quantity you're processing each day with TakeAName is far less than the 750 ordinance reservations per day that I submit with HopeChest.  TakeAName is not a tool that fits my objectives.  By using Puźzilla to get all 12th generation male IDs to drive HopeChest in descendant search produces tens of thousands of family member temple submissions.

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56 minutes ago, bhackett said:

I think the quantity you're processing each day with TakeAName is far less than the 750 ordinance reservations per day that I submit with HopeChest.  TakeAName is not a tool that fits my objectives.  By using Puźzilla to get all 12th generation male IDs to drive HopeChest in descendant search produces tens of thousands of family member temple submissions.

I think it varies from person to person based on how much temple work has already been done.

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16 hours ago, bhackett said:

I think the quantity you're processing each day with TakeAName is far less than the 750 ordinance reservations per day that I submit with HopeChest.  TakeAName is not a tool that fits my objectives.  By using Puźzilla to get all 12th generation male IDs to drive HopeChest in descendant search produces tens of thousands of family member temple submissions.

I hope the information is being verified.  Several years ago I lost interest in temple work for a time after hearing how much duplication there has been over the years (one ward member had an ancestor that was baptized over 400 times).

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For "Eowyn" - No I do not work for Hope Chest.  I have helped hundreds use it effectively and greatly appreciate the good support that Hope Chest has provided.

For "my two cents" - FamilySearch does not allow anyone to submit reservations until duplicate persons are resolved.  I have performed duplicate resolution on thousands of my family members through 12 generations so it is pretty clean now.

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1 hour ago, bhackett said:

For "my two cents" - FamilySearch does not allow anyone to submit reservations until duplicate persons are resolved.  I have performed duplicate resolution on thousands of my family members through 12 generations so it is pretty clean now.

Duplicates are not the only reason to verify.  Sometimes people are put with the wrong family, etc.

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Yes, that's true about misplaced persons.  A temple president once told me to remove duplicates and submit it as you have it.  Any corrections will be made on the other side of the veil or by close relatives that have yet to discover FamilySearch.  Even though it is not 100% correct it is very important to move the work forward.

 

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@bhackett - Thank you for sharing that!  This work can feel so daunting at times and that removes a bit of the pressure (for lack of a better word).

PS - I hope you don't feel like I've been picking on you.  I just try to keep in mind that others may read this thread down the road and certain things may need some clarification, etc. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Last week I installed a new app called Take a Name on my cell phone and the results were fast.

 

However, the names it found were those already reserved in my Temple list including those Not Printed, Printed, and Shared with the Temple. And that's what it's designed to do. So complete all the ordinances in your Temple list before reserving any additional names using Take a Name.  

 

The Take a Name Help Center states, "Please also note, due to the limitations the app encounters from FamilySearch when a user has large numbers of reservations, sometimes the app may mistakenly label one of your reservations as being reserved by someone else (or vice versa)." They define a large number as anything over 100 names. 

 

I also found that it was labeling names with "relationship unknown" when in fact the names were part of my tree.  One of the names with the "relationship unknown" still showed the ordinances were available to print. When I opened FamilySearch the name was not part of my family tree.  Why would the app have this name in the list of work to be done.

 

I released all the names in my Temple list including those Shared with Temple, and then used Take a Name again. The result was a list of names that were already completed or reserved by someone else. The few names which had available ordinances were not part of my family tree.  L

 

It's promoted as an app that will Find temple ready ancestors. Take a Name searches the FamilySearch tree for your deceased ancestors and double checks that LDS ordinances are ready for the temple."  I disagree. No app can replace what you must do. Let me explain what I mean.

 

This company warns you to do your best to "validate information for a person to provide yourself the ultimate confidence that the ordinances you perform in the temple are as correct and accurate as possible."

 

This means you need to take each name in the Take a Name list and open the file in FamilySearch.  Why?  Even though the name has a green temple, you still need to open the Vital Information and check for the following:

 

1.  The name is correctly entered in the First and Last Name field.

2.  Remove nicknames and titles (Captain, Sheriff, etc.) and put them in Other Information.

3.  Remove from the title filed Mr. or Miss.

4.  Remove the word "or" from the First name field and put the second name in Other Information.

5.  Make sure the Suffix is really a suffix. Ex. Jr

6.  All dates and places have been Standardized.

7.  The last name of a female is not her married name. Ex: Mary is married to John Brown. You don't enter her name as Mrs Mary Brown or Mary Brown.

8.  Click the "View My Relationship" to make sure the name is part of your family.

Most people will find it easier to do the above requirements using a their pc.

 

Next: open all Record Hints and attach as needed. Many Records Hints will provide you with family members that are not in your tree. In the past six months I discovered 40 to 45 missing family members per 100 Record Hints I opened.  Instead of taking one ancestor to the Temple, why not take the entire family?

 

Take a Name only builds you a list of names that have possible temple ordinances to be completed.  You still need to examine each name for duplicates that may not be listed under the tool: Possible Duplicates.

 

Before anyone blindly prints temple cards they should review the following guidelines which are in FamilySearch Get Help:

 

•     Names in Vital Information and Other Information in Family Tree

•     Entering names in Family Tree

•     Information Required for Ordinances to Be Performed

•     Names and symbols causing Needs More Information error

•     Name will not let temple ordinances clear—Needs more information

 

"Take a Name typically delivers dozens of temple ready family names in a matter of minutes." This sounds like fake advertising. No app can provide temple ready names because you still need to validate the information for each person before ordinances are performed in the temple.

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  • 1 year later...

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.

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