Issue 45.16
Part 1
Hope Chest software is a tree analyzing software that works with FamilySearch Family Tree. It will save hours of time clicking through your tree so that you can find what you are looking for without all the tedious effort. It cannot update information into your FamilySearch Account and it can support LDS features to find temple work.
Hope Chest gets bad reviews by a lot of people because some misuse the app. It can find temple work by searching up or down your pedigree, a person at a time, just like you would do, only more thoroughly. It keeps track of the search and adds the findings to a list. In Family Tree, you can set Hope Chest to search for specific things. One is “Need More Info” which helps identify ancestors who need facts researched and added to them, to more uniquely identify them. One is “In Progress,” which means someone is working on their temple work, or at least they have added it to their temple list. Another is “Request Ordinances” and this is the one most people use to find relatives that need temple ordinance work completed. It doesn’t request them for you, it takes you to Family Tree and you should look at the person and make sure they are a real person and that you are in fact related to them. Family Tree is not a perfect tree of ancestors waiting for you to find them. It is a compilation of thousands of human submissions and there are errors, a lot of errors. These errors need to be fixed.
If you just use Hope Chest to find green temples and request them without looking at each person, checking their sources, verifying your relationship to the person and making sure there are no duplicates in the system, you are misusing the app. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints should treat temple work as sacred and be more interested in quality rather than quantity. Members have also been advised to only reserve names that can be completed within a reasonable amount of time. So, if you are reserving hundreds or thousands of names, think how long that will take for them to be completed.
More on the proper use of Hope Chest next week.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com