Reserving and Printing Ordinances Preparing Dear Friends For Their Big Day at the Temple! Prerequisites This tutorial assumes you have: 1. a family member you have been researching 2. enough information on this family member to go to the temple 3. shared research between FamilySearch and Ancestry so that your source lists are identical 4. seen a green arrow in the FamilySearch button in Ancestry and a green temple icon on the Ordinances tab in FamilySearch 5. logged into your FamilySearch account Checking On the Temple Ordinances Find the family member whose ordinaces need to be reserved. In this case, we'll click on Emma C Katie Anthony. We get this pop-up.
This shows birth and death dates and places. I think it's fun to look at the source count, since that's one of my criteria for determining temple readiness. At the bottom next to the word 'TEMPLE' you can see the green squares indicating the ordinances we can reserve: baptism [B], confirmation [C], initiatory [I], and endowment [E]. You can also see that the sealing to parents [SP] and sealing to spouse [SS] are not yet available. This is because we have not yet added her parents or her husband over from Ancestry. Your assignment as part of this tutorial is to flesh out research so you can add nearby relatives, then reserve their ordinances too. When we add the parents and husband and reserve those ordinances, these sealings will be automatically reserved because they are interconnected. Looking For Possible Duplicates Before we can reserve temple ordinances however, there's a computer issue unique to FamilySearch that we need to deal with: checking for duplicates. If you and I are coming from different directions on our same family tree, we could possibly both of us create our own versions of Emma C Katie Anthony without the other one knowing it. It would be absurd for both of us to go and get her ordinances done. This isn't an issue in Ancestry since my tree is my tree and your tree is your tree. I can have an Emma in my tree and you can have the same Emma in your tree and noboby cares because they are separate trees. But here in FamilySearch, there is only One Tree: the LDS Church tree. So when we have multiple Emmas and multiple people trying to do her temple work, we have to have a way to resolve this. It's called checking for duplicates. Click on 'PERSON' in the gray bar at the bottom of the pop-up. You should now be seeing what I call the 'Person' profile.
Scroll down almost to the bottom and look for the 'Tools' widget on the right side of the page. Click on 'Possible Duplicates'.
The system tells me there are no duplicates for Emma C Katie Anthony. I'm gonna take this with a grain of salt because I remember seeing multiple FamilySearch results for Emma C Anthony when we were in Ancestry, getting ready to add her. I'm going to use FamilySearch's 'find' function to see if I can find some other Emmas. Click on Go to: Emma C Katie Anthony at the top of the page. Click 'FIND'.
I switch to the 'Find by Name' tab and enter some information. Click the blue 'Find' button at the bottom. A quick scan of the results reveals why the duplicates function didn't find anything. There do not appear to be any duplicates of Emma. Now that I'm confident of that, let's reserve some temple ordinances! For me, this is the most exciting step in the family history process. I make a big deal of it with every ancestor, but it's even more special for those rare people, such as Emma is to me, who have through the veil expressed their excitement at the realization that they are closer than ever to their big day at the temple.
Reserving the Ordinances I Click the back arrow in my browser until I get back to Emma's 'person' profile. Click the 'Ordinances' tab, which now has a green temple in it. Click the blue 'Request Ordinances' button.
Click the blue 'Request' button in the pop-up. Click the checkbox where it says 'I have read and will comply with the Church Temple Ordinance Policy'. If you haven't done it yet, now would be a good time to read through the policy. Click the blue 'Add to Temple Ordinance List' button.
Note that the green temple icon is now replaced with a blue one, and the status of all the ordinances has changed to 'Not Printed'. Standardizing Dates and Places Like all computer systems, FamilySearch is particular about the way it likes dates and places entered. It wants dates entered like this: '14 April 2017'. It wants places entered with city, county, state and country like this: 'New Albany, Floyd, Indiana, United States'. I click on the 'Details' tab to get back to Emma's 'person' profile. I want to go through her profile to do some data cleanup and to help you get familiar with the 'person' profile page.
I click on the Birth information, then click 'Edit' on the right. Notice that FamilySearch doesn't like the date or place formats; it gives us suggestions for standard format.
I click on each of the green standard suggestion boxes and select the reformatted date and place from the drop-downs that appear. Sometimes the system will put the correct format in for me, but sometimes it's stubborn and I just have to type it in. I make the appropriate edits and click the blue 'Save' button.
I need to do the same thing for the other dates and places on the page. Notice that from the person profile page, you can see this person's parents, siblings, spouse and children everything about this person is here, with links to go into family members' person profiles. If you want to see this person's pedigree chart, just click 'View Tree' in the gray header at the top of the page. Printing Temple Ordinance Cards I go back to Emma's 'person' profile page. Then I hover my mouse cursor over the 'Temple' link at the top of the page. I get this pop-up.
Since the goal here is to print ordinance cards, I'm going to click on 'Not Printed'. The first results that appear are the people I've most recently worked on: Emma and her son and his wife. I'm going to check all of them. Notice that I'm not checking the sealing ordinance this first trip is for baptisms and confirmations only. Checking people causes the blue buttons to appear at the top of the screen. You now have the option to 'Print' or 'Share'. If you want to un-reserve ordinances for any reason, you can do that as well. Click the blue 'Print' button, then in the drop-down click 'Print Family Ordinance Cards'.
I always un-check the sealing ordinances at this point. I like to print separate cards for sealing so I can complete the baptisms, confirmations, and initiatories, then leave endowments at the temple or hand them out to friends and family. (I also hand out female initiatories since I don't qualify to perform those myself.) I don't want to run the risk that someone will complete sealing ordinances to family members that haven't had their other ordinance work done yet. Besides, once the endowments are complete, I want to be part of the sealings! Click the blue 'Continue' button at the bottom of the pop-up. You'll get a 'Print Request' pop-up.
Click yet another blue 'Continue' button. The system generates a PDF file. Click to print the PDF, and you're all set! I always get excited about printing out new ordinance cards. I love feeling family members all around me from the other side, excited to see their names coming out of my printer! Once you have printed your cards, close the tab. The system will then give you another pop-up to confirm that your cards were printed successfully.
Clicking either 'Yes' or 'No' will cause the system to mark the ordinances as printed. You'll need to keep track of whether or not you have actually successfully printed. Wrapping Up Well, we've worked hard to find someone who needed our help. We've worked hard to get the research done for some of our newest and dearest friends to be able to go to the temple. We've learned and done the steps to reserve and print the ordinances. Now the only thing between you and your first time doing ordinances for the people you've found is a pair of scissors and a circle on the calendar. I remember my first time going to do ordinances for my first converts. One in particular was my Grandpa Bernie's aunt Hallie. I will never forget how I felt coming out of the font after baptizing my mother-in-law in her behalf! I was glad to have the locker room to myself so I could just sob uncontrollably at the flood of joy that overcame me. The next time you hear the words of the baptismal ordinance at the temple, the names of the people for whom you are being baptized will be familiar ones names of dear forever friends! It is my hope and my prayer that your loved ones on the other side will make as big a deal of your first time researching and then going to the temple for them as Aunt Hallie and her entourage did for me. Congratulations, you are now officially a newly minted temple work generating family historian!