Comments on: Accidental Institutional Skills, Like Genealogy

By: jes

jes — Sun, 07 Aug 2016 01:57:35 +0000

When my parents divorced and my mom needed to find a job after 30 years as a SAHM, her resume was an impressive collection experience all listed under the category of “service”. Much of their married life had been spent attending branches and my dad was often the branch president. As his unofficial branch secretary, she taught herself word processing to type the bulletin each week, formatting for the branch newsletter, and how to print address labels for mailing them out. She organized a branch fundraiser (back in the day when we had to raise money for the budget ourselves). That involved working with a large airline, receiving long narrow boxes and boxes of their used tickets, checking them out to branch members, carefully tracking who had which box, processing numberless boxes herself which involved thumbing through every ticket individually looking for tickets that belonged to other airlines, then checking processed boxes back in. This went on week after week, month after month. She was in charge of a food co-op to help make bulk purchases of food cheaper to buy in a small town. She updated and printed order forms each month, passed them out, collected orders and money, collating it all, then receiving the semi truck from Sysco with the food delivery, dividing up the food (not just by item, but sometimes 2 families would share a case of something and she’d have to divide that up) and then give the right order to reach family as they showed up that day. This was in addition to her VTing and regular callings. In one very tiny branch she was the primary president, pianist, and chorister rolled into one.

By: Bookslinger

Bookslinger — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:31:27 +0000

How to load a moving truck (Uhaul). I think it’s a gift given to EQ presidents when they are set apart.

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 17:01:32 +0000

LOL, if the Church can teach over 65s to read Asian languages enough to do genealogy then that would be quite the feat!

By: TJay

TJay — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 13:21:46 +0000

Clark Goble,
Maybe instead of doing less genealogy we will be asked to develop the institutional skills of reading Chinese and the languages of Asia.

By: TJay

TJay — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 05:24:04 +0000

Teaching classes

Organizing parties for 100 plus people (the non-LDS people I know are always astounded when I mention that I am cooking for 100 this weekend)

Writing skits and roadshows

Baking bread and all kinds of specialized cooking skills I have been taught in homemaking, everything from deboning a chicken while leaving it whole to making sushi rolls to making cream puffs

Cooking with food storage supplies

By: James Olsen

James Olsen — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 22:56:59 +0000

In my quick scan of the comments I didn’t see anyone mention these (and apologies if I missed them):
–Agricultural skills, particularly gardening
–Canning & preserving
–Playing the piano and organ – and instruments/singing/music in general (I’m always shocked at how few non-Mormons I meet who play piano)
–Cultural negotiation
–Blogging

Dave, you should emend the post to include a list at the bottom of everything mentioned.

By: Zillah

Zillah — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 15:30:47 +0000

A bit of a sidenote about The Swerve.

It’s a great story, but it’s important to know that the story is wrong, Pulitzer Prize aside. Its depiction of the Middle Ages and book culture has been thoroughly dismantled by medievalists and modernists alike. I don’t know if I can post links here, but if you google it, it’s easy to find a good review essay in the LA Review of Books, the academic blog In the Middle, and a modernist’s take on it in n+1.

(I’m sure that I can draw some sort of meta-conclusion about this, related to the real topic of the post, but I will just say that it’s interesting how The Swerve reinforces Greenblatt’s view of the Middle Ages, driven by his hatred of religion, and the Mormon view of the Middle Ages, driven by our own religious narrative.)

By: Robert

Robert — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:24:35 +0000

Pageants

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 18:07:15 +0000

The language issue is a great point I’d not thought of. Although that seems to more or less make my point better. As a practical matter most members don’t have the language skills to do Asian genealogy which means genealogy will cease for most members within a few decades.

By: TJay

TJay — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 17:55:22 +0000

Clark Goble,
I would love to know the name of the program where people are connecting other people’s genealogy. I am on familyseach at least five times a week and have never heard of it. You might be referring to descendency research where people add descendants down from a common ancestor, so maybe it is just semantics as to are they your relative.
I too believe American and Canadian and probably British research could be substantially finished within 20 years. We possess many of the records now.
But the big numbers are in Asia, China and India in particular. That is where the billions come in. These records require language skills out of the reach of most Mormons. If we do well in converting substantial numbers of people in these countries, we could take a giant leap forward.
Even Russian records require the ability to read not just modern Russian but a Russian that has letters no longer in use. I lasted about four hours in my attempt to do that.
The problem with much of Europe is that many of the records we really need are in Catholic Churches. If Rome changes their policy and allows us to copy them, yes, we could finish Europe in a few decades. Without them, no, we cannot finish Europe.
There is a problem that exists in indexing, most likely the program your father participates in, to create indices for all the records on microfilm and digital images, in that most of the indexers speak English while most of the unindexed records are not in English. Many index outside their language but the work is always better if you can read the document you are indexing. If more non-English speakers sign up to index, I agree we could at least index the records we have within a few decades. But that would require a huge increase in non-English speakers.
There are two additional problems not mentioned. The easy adding of names from online sources goes very quickly. As I said, I can add over 1,000 a year. Really researching a family requires much more than that, consulting all the records that are not online and sometimes visiting the places in person to consult local sources and meet distant relatives and to pay for death, birth and marriage certificates that are not online. I have spent over $10,000 to do my direct line. I would not do that for descendancy research. To actually finish will require real research and that is usually only done by direct family members.
The second problem is the number of competent genealogists in the Church willing to devote hours a day to this work. Perhaps I am cynical, but most of the people I have helped, who want to get their family research done, are just not good at this task. Those willing to take classes and spend real time understanding what records are needed to be reasonably certain you have the right family are few. I have spent too much time at family history libraries where people express the belief that three hours of their time was just as much as they want to give to believe we are anywhere near being done.
I do not remember what the percentage of church members one of the General Authorities mentioned as having not even entered the names of their parents into the database, but it startled me because it was so high. It is not as if this actually required research for most people, just 15 minutes of typing.
As this said, I agree wholeheartedly that we are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were just a few years ago. And I am sure the Lord has a plan for us to get where we need to be.

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 04:37:13 +0000

Just to add. I’m completely willing to concede I may be misinformed on some issues. I’ll try to talk to my dad who is much better informed. I may be mangling in my memory things he told me. (It wouldn’t be the first time)

The back of the envelope numbers though which don’t even include under 65 or non-Americans doing work makes me think that in a few decades we’ll be done. But even if it’s a decade or two more, that’ll be a significant shift. As I mentioned I think the shift regarding people’s own families for most American Mormons is starting to happen already. I know lots and lots of people who’ve gone back as far as they can and now are going forward from their far back ancestors. (My dad is doing that) Or else even doing other people’s work within reasons.

The church for good reason has limits on what people can do they aren’t directly related to — although I confess I did the temple work for a ton of scientists and philosophers before the new rules became enforced. In particular Gauss was one I really felt a strong spiritual connection to. (He’d tried to gain what we’d call a testimony most of his life but despite seeking God and being a fairly religious person never achieved it. Unlike many scientists who weren’t exactly sociable or necessarily good people, he really was an amazing guy and did a lot of work to get women into science at a time it was unheard of.)

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 04:29:49 +0000

TJay, I meant people doing other people’s genealogy work of making connections. Not their own. My dad does that and probably puts in 20 – 30 hours a week doing that. He is also part of that project to enter in data. I don’t recall the details but I know there’s a website he goes to do the work. I’ll try and remember to ask him for the details.

Regarding numbers at 1,500 per year it’d take 30,000 people only 22 years to do a billion records. I’m not sure how many retired members there are in western areas with extensive internet. Pew puts it for the US at 15% which given Pew’s self-identification numbers is around 4 million in the US. That’s 600,000 although you have to assume many in that group are unwilling or unable to do significant amount of genealogy. Let’s be safe and say half won’t/can’t. Likewise lets assume many can’t get close to as fast as you and put an average rate at around 700 (since these individuals will get better with time) So 300,000,000 people doing 700 families per year for around 30 years (although US Mormon population is growing, so there’d actually be many more over time) That gives us 6.3 billion names just by Americans over 30 years.

If you assume that over that period more of the world will gain internet and that the Church has modest growth (we’ll ignore Europe which I suspect will have negative growth) then 10 billion seems pretty achievable. That’s without assuming any technical innovations that would increase efficiency.

By: Bryan in VA

Bryan in VA — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 22:23:32 +0000

Pageants!

By: TJay

TJay — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 21:54:17 +0000

Clark Goble,
I may have missed something but I do not know of any current church projects that tie people together in families (doing relations). I believe that is being left to the individuals.
I know when I questioned whether or not familysearch had some plan in mind to help us just to eliminate the duplicates as we put together family members into families, these being records for individuals that had been extracted and the temple work already done or partially done, I was told online on familysearch that this was the individual family’s responsibilty.
This was so even though each family was taking me four hours to fix. I was collapsing the records of 16 people into two records so that the children would show together. Also the system will not allow you to complete the temple work until you eliminate the duplicate records.
I then asked if familysearch was planning on providing any help by sorting the 115 million Italian records into families and was told no. This was the responsibilty of the individual families, working one person at a time.
So I am not seeing what you suggest being done by retired people for other people’s families.
Also, as a person with over 40 years experience at this and willing to devote hours a day to it, I do not think I could create actual families out of indexed records faster than 2,000 people a year. ( I did 1,500 last year.) Again, that would take me and every active LDS adult in the church 10 years to do the records we have now, working two to six hours per day.
And that assumes you possess a lot of genealogical knowledge. There is an ongoing problem the Church is facing now where the experienced genealogists have begun posting their questions on the problem feedback page rather than ask for help from the family history missionaries assigned to help them. I have read multiple complaints that the researchers just cannot get the help they need from these missionaries.
And do not even consider the work required to straighten out the records with patrynomic naming conventions. Anyone touching these needs a great deal more knowledge than the average teenager assigned to find family names when they do baptisms for the dead. Generally they, and other inexperienced people, end up creating more of a mess than they know. This is also a constant refrain from the experienced genealogists. They are spending all their time trying to stop others from destroying the research they spent decades doing.
I witnessed this problem as well when I was a volunteer in one of the big family history libraries. The wards had called a number of people as service missionaries, but they simply lacked the knowledge necessary to actually help people. And it was not a matter of a few months training. The people there who could actually help others had all been researching for over 20 years. They finally assigned these new people to index. They were too old and usually too uninterested to take the time to be fully useful in their calling.
I simply do not see what you are expecting being doable in a small time frame. Nothing less than 100 years.

By: Clark Goble

Clark Goble — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 19:17:37 +0000

Dave (18) “When there is no text presented as “the revelation,” my suspicion is there was simply a decision or policy change, then to support that decision the term “revelation” gets attached at some later point to bolster a weak or problematic policy.”

I suspect most revelations don’t have a text. I bet if we’re talking about personal individual inspiration it’s very rarely textual like but is a prompting or vague idea. Even a lot of Joseph’s major ideas don’t have clear textual revelations. Typically we have at best presentations to the inner circle with fragmentary notes (some of which get expanded to sections in the D&C obscuring that the really is no revelatory text behind them). Put an other way I think it’s far more common to the have things like Joseph’s King Follet Discourse or Sermon in the Grove than to have things like D&C 88 or 76. Now of course there are elements of the KFD the church largely rejects, such as the nature of the resurrection of children. But there are elements that it largely accepts. Then there is the blurry middle ground.

I’d also question the distinction between policy and revelation. Surely temporary policy changes can be revealed. The category of policy vs. doctrine just seems deeply problematic. (When Moses went back to the Lord after he saw the Golden Calf was that a policy change or doctrine?)

With regards to D&C 132 or the John Taylor 1886 it seems to me the key question is whether established sealings are valid. Either they are or aren’t. Ditto for sealings since (including remarriages). I think the answer has to be that they are. (I recognize this is not something people who think there’s no multiple valid marriages in the hereafter accept – but I think that’s a pretty difficult position to defend theologically) The main point of difference between the Church and the various breakoffs after Woodruff is whether it’s required to be polygamist here and now in the flesh with living people. However again given Jacob 2 and the fact lots of people died without being such makes it difficult theologically to argue that it is. The John Taylor 1886 revelation definitely doesn’t establish that (or even addresses it).

An interesting but rarely discussed issue is also how literally dictated textual revelations, like many Taylor produced, actually is. That is how much is a “close enough” textual position with various expansions or errors by the receiver. (As opposed to say how Muslims perceive the Koran to be dictated by God typically)

I think that we tend to privilege text far more than is justified, perhaps due to influence by the non-mainline protestant figures that largely became Evangelicalism in the postwar era. I think it undeniable it shaped a lot of early Mormon apologetics and theology (especially in the era from the 1920’s through the 1980’s). I’m just not sure that privileging of textuality is warranted even with clear scripture let alone over Prophets making changes and claiming revelation. (We should note there’s no text for the 1978 revelation on priesthood either)