On a visit this week to the temple with my daughter, I learned a few interesting things. I noticed that during confirmations, the temple has only printed sheets with three names. The temple worker said the temple is running out of names, so if you don’t bring your own names, they will let you only do three confirmations and four baptisms. They also said they won’t allow endowed people to be baptized on behalf of the dead unless they bring their own names.
Have people heard this at other temples?
I know that in the early days of the church, genealogy was much more difficult, so the church found names for people. According to the FamilySearch website, some members are hoarding names, so that is why they have put a time limit on completing ordinances, and are encouraging people to release names to the temple.
My kids love to do baptisms. Baptisms, confirmations, initiatories, and sealings take little time per person. I have a backlog of endowments to do and I wish you could release only endowments to the temple so you could complete the sealings yourself.
Are you encouraged by the fact that there is so much temple work being done that the church is having trouble keeping up?
Wheat & Tares 
You don’t mention which temple you went to, but I have heard similar comments from friends and family around Idaho and Utah.
A friend asked once, if we are out of names now…what are we supposed to work on suring the Millennium?
It’s wonderful news, isn’t it?
During the Millennium, resurrected persons will be able to come to the temple themselves, or at least identify themselves as in need of ordinances.
We’re also waiting for a lot of records to be digitized and accessible from non-English speaking countries. We’ve mined the easy pickings and are going to have to go global for more. I’ve noticed our temple has been doing a lot of Hungarian names the past couple years.
There are billions of people who’ve lived and died and for whom there are no records to find and we will never be able to find their records b/c none were kept. . (Think of the thousands of deaths in the war chapters of the BOM, for starters.). Most of human history suffers from this record deficit and it will have to be cured during the millennium. Thus, there will be billions of names or people available for temple work during that time. I, for one, am quite happy to let a resurrected person do his or her own temple work. There are other things I think I would prefer to do during that time than spending days and days in a temple. Until then, billions of spirits are trapped with no escape hatch b/c there are no earthly records of their birth, death, marriage, children etc. Decent record keeping is a relatively recent phenomenon and limited to certain classes of people.
Non-Utah person here. Our local temple has also reduced the number of names to be given to youth for baptism and confirmation. They say: “Bring your own in order to do more!” Plenty of endowments to do every time I show up.
Not sure about the baptisms but I have heard that they are being rationed.
In the calgary temple there is a cabinet where people can put their family names for endowments. I usually take one from my ward to assist them.
I have given names to the temple in hopes of them getting done quicker, years later they are still sitting around waiting to be done.
Even when my kids bring family names they are limited to 5 a visit regardless of how many I actually have. Some days this is because the temple is busy, other days there is close to no one waiting and still only allowed 5 a piece of my own family names.
This is at Provo and Provo City Center.
I have also worked at the two temples above and have never heard that we are running out of names from an authoritative source.
Same experience as RobertM – sharing them with the temple system isn’t speedy, though I still find it preferable if I’ve found a large amount of names. Here in Salt Lake there are rumors of name shortages in baptistries, so at least one person I know shares everything she finds with the temple system.
The temples here limit how many family names you’re allowed to do each visit. The last couple times I’ve done initiatories in the Salt Lake Temple they’ve limited me to 3 and 4 names, respectively (I had family cards). At first I thought it was because they were super busy and had a 45-minute wait, but the second time they weren’t busy at all.
It is my understanding that the Church is concerned that family names will run low in the next few years. That is why they are encouraging families to bring their own names to the temple. However, I have waited a couple of years to get our family names completed in the temple in Utah.
It’s strange to me that the temple in the OP allows more baptisms than confirmation. Seems like having ratio other than one to one would cause problems.
I find this all very confusing. I have been told that time does not exist in the afterlife as it does here. If that is the case, those “waiting for their work” can’t be “waiting” as that involves time.
I guess I am one of those that just does not get the temple. I would rather be weeding an elderly person’s garden in the middle of the hot summer than going to the temple. Spiritually the temple just does zero for me.
Another issue is that there are inherent bottlenecks in the current system. Baptisms take a lot less time than initiatories which are much faster than endowments (the longest of all). Sealings are fairly quick as well but often require additional people that may not be readily available. “Fast” ordinances may run out while “slow” ones get behind.
Those rules sound similar to our (non-Utah) temple. Endowed members can’t do baptisms unless they are family names, and non-family baptisms are limited to three. But the only restriction on family baptisms is “as many as are reasonable” given how busy the baptistry is.
We are still doing five initiatories at a time, and we haven’t been told a limit to how many sheets you can do. Last Saturday, we had men doing family names and then been given temple names, too.
I can’t think of a reason why endowments of temple names would have a backlog getting done, unless family names are crowding them out. But I have to confess that when I am picking a temple name to give to a patron in the name booth, I tend to favor names that are easier for me to pronounce.
I suspect that part of the limitation on doing baptisms of temple names is what hawkgrrrl suggests, an attempt to clear out the bottlenecks and make a more even workload.
a Happy Hubby, come to my house for the weeds. I don’t consider myself elderly yet, but I’d love the help!
What if we use fictitious names and get the work done for lots of available souls (that is still proxy work), and the after world missionaries can line those up in shopping center like building shelves with golden paved roads, and as the souls on the other side are ready, they can go pick from available proxy work completed in our temples and get in line on that side of the veil and have it assigned to them? Push the lines to their side.
Why do we have to do all the figuring out? They can do some temple work too.
Seems unproductive to have everything depend on us and our bottlenecks.
Like A Happy Hubby I see so much need in the living I think the dead can wait.
I think helping elderly people is always a good thing to do. For me, research is the part I find fulfilling. There’s something to tying families together and locating each individual that is intellectually and spiritually satisfying. Totally not my husband’s thing, though. Each person has different ways of helping others. There are plenty of elderly people who are grateful for help locating their family members.
Mary Ann, I think it’s kinda interesting to find the stories and learn about families like assembling a puzzle.
But, in all seriousness, how do you find it helps others? What if we don’t “find” someone, what does it matter to them? Just curious your thoughts.
I dipped my toe into family history last year, but more from the perspective of just learning about and connecting with my ancestors than doing ordinances for them. I was surprised at the strength of the feelings I had when learning about these people. It gave me hope that I may be remembered by and still connected to those who come after me.
My feelings about temple work are very mixed. On one hand I have felt great peace there. There’s incredible value in doing sacred things together in sacred spaces. But the mathematics of temple work are hard for me to swallow. I can’t believe that God would make a plan for his children that required them to receive these ordinances, then deny 99.999% of them the chance to perform those ordinances in life, and instead shunt them into the catch-all of “we’ll get to them in the Millennium.” More practically, my heart breaks a little bit to think of all the time and money devoted to proxy ordinances instead of serving the needy among us. I wish we were as serious about loving our neighbors as we are about doing ordinances for our dead.
Heber13, “But, in all seriousness, how do you find it helps others? What if we don’t “find” someone, what does it matter to them? Just curious your thoughts.”
Not sure if you are asking about helping living people or helping dead people. It’s much easier to see how it helps living people.
— A friend asked for my help in locating information about her 80+-yr-old mother’s birth parents. The friend was Mormon, but the mom wasn’t. When we found pictures of that mom’s biological relatives, my friend started sobbing at the physical characteristics that matched her mom. She later said that her mom was in tears when she was presented what we found. You don’t realize how meaningful knowing where you come from is until you meet someone who is seeing it for the first time. Once we pieced together the circumstances surrounding the teenage birth mom’s tumultuous family life, her request that the baby girl be placed in a home where she would be an only child made a lot more sense. My friend’s mom was always grateful to her loving foster parents, but she better understood and appreciated why the birth mom made that unique request.
–Recently I’ve been helping several wardmembers get permission to do ordinance work for more recent family members. In one case a lady received part of an inheritance from a first cousin who had no closer heirs. It was a sizable inheritance, and this wardmember felt like the temple work was a way she could give something back. In the other case, the wardmember was working on several aunts, uncles and cousins her husband personally knew and wanted to make sure their work got done. In one case we found out a 90+-yr-old cousin was still alive, and she excitedly took the phone number I found so that she could call and get in touch with this lady. It wasn’t just about getting temple work done for random people.
–In a more general sense, going through the process of discovery, of seeing the records over that family member’s life (birth, childhood, adulthood, death), often creates an emotional attachment. Knowing that the person is part of your family forces a type of ownership in their experience. That’s what people are going for when they advocate kids to find stories of their *own* pioneer ancestors for trek – they want kids to develop a sense of ownership in their ancestor’s faith journey so the kid will have greater investment in that shared religious tradition. Knowing your family member fought in a specific war or battle will make that war or battle suddenly more meaningful. Same with other events or places. (It’s a double-edged sword, though – sometimes you find out your ancestors were scumbags, and that’s not a comfortable thing to own.) Like Brent pointed out, the process of discovering your ancestors and family members makes you more reflective about what later family members will associate with you.
As far as helping dead people – I’m just working off a gut feeling, and my gut feeling over years of working with this stuff is that every person is significant. It’s like when you talk to someone who lost a baby, even if that baby was only alive for a few hours, that life permanently impacts *many* people. Family history buffs are similar to historians and archaeologists where the artifacts/sources they use are merely tools for understanding real people. When you value someone as real, as human, you want others to value them as well. So when you put the families together, trying to get the names right, trying to get the dates right, it’s like you’re saying, “I see you. You matter.” I don’t necessarily get a whole lot out of doing the temple work, but I know that when the temple work is getting done the deceased person is getting thought of, and the deceased person is being deemed worthy for living people to spend their time on them. My gut feeling says deceased people appreciate that, but I’ve never actually had someone come back and confirm it. 😉
Those are great stories. Thanks for answering.
I am sometimes unsure if it is genealogy or temple work that makes it special. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Bringing their spirits back to us and thinking of them is a good thing, the temple work is an extension of that with hopes and faith.
How many of you are having problems finding an ancestor or other deceased relative who needs ordinances? How much time do you spend searching before you quit for the day? How many days do you wait before you try again? Do you use any tools to help you find those who need ordinances? If there’s a tipping point where you quit for the day? Does your quitting point relate more to the time spent, the complexity of the process, or the percentage of searches down various family lines that end in failure? Regarding your particular quit-for-the-day criteria, how bad does it have to get? Is there a point at which, after giving up, you would even consider paying for a service to find ordinance-ready relatives for you, particularly if the payment were per name, and only after verifiable results were produced?
If there are any here who are shocked and want to fire off a money-changers-at-the-temple flame message, please note that even the Family History Library once had a research team that Church members could hire to find their ancestors. That team charged by the hour for research, not for results, and many of the names they found were ones whose ordinances were already done. I’m noodling a value exchange that is actually better for the customer. I’m talking about customers paying a fee in exchange for information or temple cards of a deceased relative found in a historical record who needs ordinances and whose relationship to the customer is clearly verifiable on FamilySearch.
I don’t know why some are commenting here that resurrected beings will be able to do their own temple work. My understanding is that after you are resurrected, you cannot yourself receive any saving ordinances, and they must be received by proxy. I thought that was the whole point of Jesus’ “they are neither married nor given in marriage” comment about those who are resurrected.
Sam Smith,
those are my thoughts exactly. All temple work must be done prior to the ressurrection. So, if we as a people don’t complete all the temple work for all the people by the time the Savior comes, the whole earth will be wasted and smitten by a curse.
I know, this may seem an impossibility to the carnal mind. That’s why God is a God of miracles and He will complete the Temple work using miraculous events. (idk how, but I trust He will)