Staff Meeting Last Night

A website I was unaware of, for those of us who have early LDS Church members: Early Latter-day Saints

New Familysearch has been put on hold indefinitely.

Apparently, when the website went online in Mesa, Arizona, the thing just crashed. Other areas, in their "90-day rollout period," have longer to wait before the website is available to everyone in their areas, and those of us who were waiting patiently for our rollout period to begin are crying into our pedigree charts.

The purpose of the rollout period is to give Family History Center staff and ward consultants the opportunity to learn the program, so that when the website becomes available to everyone in the area, we can teach our ward members and FHC patrons how to use it. Having had a small taste of this program, I was really looking forward to its release, and I know it'll get here eventually... but I'm disappointed that it's taking even longer now.

New Familysearch will provide a way for us genealogists to look at all of our ancestors' entries that people have submitted over the years to the LDS Church genealogy database, and consolidate all those duplicated names into one name, thus helping to connect all of our work together. We'll all retain jurisdiction over our own work - no one will be able to change information we've submitted - but we'll be able to look over other genealogists' work and connect our people with theirs, forming a giant family tree.

While deceased persons' information will be visible to all, living persons' information will be kept private and only visible to that person. Everyone, not just LDS Church members, will have access to the website via a username and password.

If you have access to the new Familysearch, please use it often, enjoy it, and think of poor Millie when you do. Awwwww.