Asking with Real Intent

We always learn a lot as we work with great missionaries in the Training Zone. My young missionary this week has been very willing to do whatever I asked and has great computer and keyboarding skills. However, we weren’t really getting any place very fast because his lines are difficult to research. Last Thursday afternoon just before the break, he verbalized his desire: “I really would like to find someone so I could take his name to the temple. I’d even work all day Saturday if I could.” When he returned to the computer, it was as though the heavens were opened and information just flowed. He couldn’t type fast enough. We found several different years of censuses to document two families as well as birth, death, and marriage records. By Friday afternoon he had extended his pedigree three generations and prepared six men, two women, and two couples to receive their ordinances. With joy we went to the Salt Lake Temple and printed out the cards. He will do the work for the men and send the other work to his family in Idaho. Moroni 10:4-5 we are counseled to ask with real intent, not just academic knowledge. We have to be willing to do something with the knowledge we are requesting. It was a special experience for us both to find so much information in such a short time.

John’s student is an accomplished researcher with excellent computer skills in PowerPoint, Excel, etc. She wants to know everything in detail about the programs we are using so John is teaching in depth the things we learned for certification three years ago. It is an intense review for him.

Saturday morning we did sealings in the Jordan River Temple, then initiatory work. Five members of our group brought family names cards to do sealings and we didn’t get through all of them. We have participated in this monthly sealing group since 1993 and for many years, in the beginning, we just did the temple names from the extracted work. Now people bring their own names to the temple so extraction work is no longer necessary. There are plenty of names in the Temple File to do if we don’t have our own.

Note: Extraction work is what our parents and others did faithfully in the 1980’s and 1990’s. They indexed the names, then the names were sent to the temple to have the ordinances done. Families were not put together. Children were sealed to parents or marriages were done. With indexing that we do today the information is keyboarded into a digital format so that it can be read and searched by the computer. No temple work is done but the information is readily available for everyone. This is the reason that it is important to search for duplicates in new.FamilySearch because some of the temple work for the family may already be done. I have also found it an excellent source for the maiden names for marriages where I knew the husband, the date, and the first name of the wife. In the last quarter of 2011 one billion names were put on computer into FamilySearch.org. In the current quarter of 2012, the goal is to add two billion more names because they have faster, better equipment. One of the zones in our mission is responsible for doing that work. The pace of family history work is accelerating in a miraculous way.