The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publishes four worldwide periodicals: the Ensign, Liahona, New Era and Friend.

All of the magazines are available on the Church’s website for free; subscriptions are available for the printed versions. 

Members of the Church eagerly anticipate each issue of the Ensign and Liahona.  Both magazines publish the same content, but the Ensign only in English, whilst the Liahona is made available throughout the world in 61 langauges (‘Making Church Magazines’, Ensign, Jul 2008, pp. 64–69).

Ensign and Liahona issues always begin with a message from the First Presidency (the governing body of the Church consisting of the Prophet and two counsellors).

Messages from the Twelve (Apostles) are included in all magazines, as well as articles written and submitted by ordinary Church members and magazine staff.

Because the periodicals are authorized by a member of the Seventy and Twelve (ibid.), Church members accept anything written in the publications as scripture.  In fact, anything which a Prophet says officially, in the name of the Saviour, is considered considered scriptural: it is direct revelation from God.

FamilySearch has revamped its website.  According to Renee Zamora’s blog (rzamor1.blogspot.com/2008/07/familysearchorg-new-look), the genealogy giant owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened its redesigned site on Thursday.

The makeover is in preparation for the integration of FamilySearch’s many websites popularly used by Church members and the general public.  One of these is FamilySearch Indexing (www.familysearchindexing.org), where millions of genealogical records which are currently only available on microfilm are being transcribed by volunteers.   The project is revolutionary: the world-famous records in the granite vault in Salt Lake City are being placed online by people who work at home for a few minutes every week.

FamilySearch Indexing already has its own tab on the newly designed FamilySearch website.

New FamilySearch (new.familysearch.org) has already become a sensation amongst Church members.  A worldwide database of family trees is being stored on this site, allowing members to collaborate and submit names for Temple ordinances quickly.  The Church is currently implementing the system in temples around the world.

NFS has not been given a link on the original, revamped, FamilySearch page, but provision for it is being made.

According to a statement on the Church’s website, the Triple Combination is now available online in Danish, Dutch and Hungarian.

The Triple Combination is a volume of scriptures unique to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is published in order to conveniently place The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price in one book.

The Church is currently working on place about two dozen languages of the Triple Combination online.  Prior to this announcement, English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian versions were available.

The Combination can be accessed at scriptures.lds.org.

See:

• Statement from the Church

According to schedule, the Johannesburg South Africa Temple will today begin utilising the New FamilySearch website instead of the old TempleReady system.

Members of the Church will now be able to submit names for ordinance work themselves and will no longer have to wait days before the names are ready.  A simple printout, the Family Ordinance Request, which can be done in a few minutes, is all that is needed.  This is then taken to the Temple staff, who will the print ordinance cards which one then takes through to do the actual ordinances.

For more information on this story, see the Post’s article ‘Alive with New FamilySearch‘.

The Teddington Post (the original edition found at teddington.wordpress.com) brought you exclusive news on Thursday that the New FamilySearch website had just become available for Southern and Central African members’ registration (see teddington.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/breaking-news-johannesburg-temple-district-members-can-register-on-new-familysearch).

The availability comes as the Johannesburg Temple is making preparations to ‘go live’ with the Church’s new system on Tuesday.

This website was envisaged by President Gordon B. Hinckley, mainly to stop the large amount of duplication occurring in Temples around the world. Because members could not centralise and share information easily, they subsequently worked on and submitted names without knowing that ordinances had already been done for.

Now, members will all contribute to a centralised database, which will eventually link all of humanity, supposing that the databank remains through the Millennium.

Millions of names the Church has held for years, such as Temple work done, extraction programmes, Church membership records and Ancestral and Pedigree File, are all online already. When members sign on for the first time, they can choose to either upload their family history from another genealogy program (such as PAF) and then sort through all the names, checking for duplicates from the above-mentioned databases; or they can start from scratch and search for and add those names that already exist in the said databases.
Eventually, a chain will emerge and members will find it easy to contact others working on their lines.

The process for doing ordinance work is also much more simplified. Members now need only to reserve the names they wish to do, print out a sheet called a Family Ordinance Request and give it to the Temple staff, who then print cards that are taken to the ordinances. Instead of waiting for weeks after submission before an ordinance can be done, members can now decide on the day.

New FamilySearch (NFS) is still in its rolling-out stage, with 44% of Temples across the globe presently online. Another 27% are in the preparatory stages, Johannesburg included until Tuesday. Once all Temples have been linked up, the website will be opened to the general public and the old FamilySearch site (www.familysearch.org) will be decommissioned.

The FamilySearch organisation, which is operated by the Church, has also galvanised 104 000 people to voluntarily index millions of names from records currently held in the granite vaults in Salt Lake City. This will mean that records currently only available through microfilm or government archives will be digitised and placed on FamilySearch for anyone to search, free of charge. 50 million names have been indexed so far.

Those wishing to help in this massive indexing effort can register at www.familysearchindexing.org. Indexing can be done at home, through batches of images previously scanned in Salt Lake being sent to one’s computer. One then transcribes the images and sends back the data.

Those collections already indexed are being made available gradually on search.labs.familysearch.org.