Issue 37.14
Part 3
FamilySearch is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For this, the Church calls and sets apart missionaries who work specifically with family history. With an increased emphasis on family history initiatives, the Family History Department is looking to add more missionaries either as couples or singles. There are three different types of family history missionary experiences to help accommodate a variety of life circumstances. Members can serve a family history mission away from home, close to home or directly from home.
Directly from home
Because the Family History Department receives over a half million phone calls, emails or chats each year, which is approximately the same number of patrons that visit the family history library in Salt Lake City each year, there is a huge need for members willing to serve missions from their homes.
This is the opportunity I took to serve, beginning in April 2010. Art Johnson explains it as, “Missionaries serve in a virtual contact-center setting from the convenience of their homes.” We use our own Internet connection and our personal phone and our own computer for our workstation.
For missionaries to be up to date on everything FamilySearch, they are trained for 20 to 25 hours per week for up to seven weeks. The training is done through webinars, Skype and other means of communication for meeting online. Once the missionaries have finished the training and logged in to begin work, they will be connected to the FamilySearch hotline, through which they can receive calls or chats from people all over the world. They provide friendly, accurate and timely assistance for any family history question. Help is there on Skype from other missionaries and team leaders as well as the extensive knowledge base system.
Even though these types of missionaries work from home, the Family History Department has created ways for them to interact with other stay-at-home missionaries. We communicate through the same means used for training, so we also develop close relationships and friendships. Some of the people I keep in touch with most are those I met working in this mission.
Interested members should visit the Family History Missionary website found at familysearch.org/mission. There, you can learn about the options that are available and, with that information, you can choose which of these options will be the best for you. You can also call toll-free 1-855-346-4774 or send an email to mission@familysearch.org.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com (435) 628-4900.