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I don't know if Roger would have caught wind of something like this, but it was fascinating to sit in on an address by the "marketing manager" of familysearch yesterday at the new Church office building in Riverton, which houses the new offspring Family History Center. This man (I forget his name; perhaps Green) had just come from a Scouting meeting. Apparently the BSA gave him a huge tent stuffed with computers at the Centennial Pow-wow to help Scouts with the Genealogy Merit Badge. I think he said 8,000 went through it, and 1,000 actually earned the badge. Now they want Bro. Green to head up a similar offering at the International Pow-Wow in Sweden!

So--he arrived in a beautifully decorated Scout shirt. It was soon clear that he had been in charge of a totally new "leaders' guide" for LDS Family History, which had JUST been issued on-line (lds.org > menu > Serving in the Church > Melchisedek Priesthood > Other Callings). Gist is that the department decided that ("it's a burden; it takes too much time; it makes me feel stupid") familysearch instruction has really been taken out of sequence; that we have to come in from the other end to "turn the hearts", e.g., simply present someone with a temple card to do for one of his own family--i.e. through temple/family history; or through catching the spirit by indexing first. Anyway, what was NOT working was to marry up the uninitiated with the expert! Also, he said, those who "have the (Priesthood) keys" must "have their hearts turned" first for this subject to swing in a ward.

I thought at least some of you might be interested in this. Roger might also be interested to know (if he doesn't already) that NFS currently contains 22 pedabytes of information. Also that if we don't get 10 times the number of indexers we have now, indexing will take 100 more years! (This despite the figure just released for 1020--c. 186 million names indexed! On Sunday, Jan. 9th, 2011. there were close to 2 million names indexed alone! Hurray for new year's resolutions.)

Well, enough from me!

Lots of love,

Grandma