For those of you that volunteer at your FHC and have signed up as Family History Consultants at http://consultant.familysearch.org/ you will now have seen an announcement that TempleReady is being replaced by something called “new FamilySearch”.

A site has been made accessible to all Church Member consultants at http://new.familysearch.org/ and you can sign up for access at that site by clicking on the Register link. You will need your membership number (11 digits) and your confirmation date. If you do not have this information please contact your Ward Membership Clerk to get it so that you can sign up.

Once you have signed up, you will fill out a profile and will then have access to the site. What you will find on the site are training materials including a video that will launch automatically (which I suggest you watch), as well as links to PDF format guide books and lessons that you can follow.

All Church members will be using the new system to prepare to take names to the temple as of the switch over. They will be able to upload gedcom files or individual names for work (note: a gedcom file can be extracted from your genealogy software – it doesn’t need to be the whole file, maybe a family or group of individuals). The system will then compare the names to those in the up-to-date temple ordinance records (like IGI but current) and only let you prepare those that are incomplete. You will then be able to reserve which names you wish to complete ordinances for (I suggest only reserving those that you think you can complete in a reasonable amount of time – otherwise you are preventing someone else from doing the work if they wish) and print something called a Temple Ordinance Request to take to the temple (no disk is required).

In addition, anyone who is signed up on the system can also log in as a “helper”. This is to help other members prepare their names and I guess how we will assist others in the library (unless we encourage them to sign up with their own account).

The good news is that the system looks to be way simpler than the current system and has plenty of help options. However, we are still going to run into the existing issue of preparing a gedcom from PAF or whatever software is being used.