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.

The Johannesburg Temple is to Go Live with New FamilySearch on 8 July 2008

A number of sources have confirmed to me that the Johannesburg Temple has received this, the date of its going live with New FamilySearch.  It appears that family history staff in our temple district have been informed; family history blogs have obtained the information as well and are reporting it.

Concerning going ‘live’, the Ancestry Insider (ancestryinsider.blogspot.com)says:

‘Registered family history consultants and leaders are notified when their temple districts are about to change to NFS [New FamilySearch]. … The initial notification usually gives an approximate time frame of 3 or 4 months for the NFS release, but not a specific date. A final notification gives the date to stop using TempleReady, the date all temple district members can access NFS and the date the temple will begin using NFS.’

The same blog provides information that on 8 July, members will be able to print cards for temple ordinances using a Family Ordinance Request.  This system makes use of the New FamilySearch website, available at new.familysearch.org.  Apparently, members will be able to register on and access the site about three days prior to the activation (about 5 July 2008), early in the morning.

With this announcement, Renee Zamora, on her blog ‘Renee’s Genealogy Blog’ (rzamor1.blogspot.com), says that 56 temples are now live and 34 are in the process of going live.  That leaves only 37 which have not been announced.

This is a most exciting development for members in our region.

For those of you who know are thoroughly confused by the above, the Church has been introducing an incredible new system called New FamilySearch.  The website’s predecessor, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org), is one of the largest family history research websites in the world.