A bit delayed in giving you a follow-up of our last meeting. So here are the scoops and some additional thoughts. Thank you for all who attended our meeting. So grateful for your time and service, it doesn't go unnoticed.

General Conference earlier this month was amazing. Such a great theme of temple work, ministering and changes in the quorums of the priesthood. Which also means that the High Group Leader is no longer the presiding priesthood over the ward temple and family history consultants. We now have the Elder's quorum presidency that is over us. Please keep in mind that we may not get the attention we need at the beginning as they get used to their new responsibilities. 

The Family History Guide is your go-to for learning how to use FamilySearch Family Tree, Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and many others. It will also help with your research. In the next post, I will share with you more info regarding this website but keep it in mind in your own personal training and those that you help. A great resource.

BYU Family History Library YouTube channel. This is a gold mine of information. There are tutorials or webinars from their library on how to use the many websites we use for research and for our callings. These videos are uploaded weekly with new content. Make sure you click on 'Playlists' for a more organized version of all their videos. Pay attention to when the videos were uploaded so you know you will have the latest information.

LDS.org has updated their family history pages. The old ones are still there but we need to use the new pages located HERE. Or if you go to lds.org click on 'Families and Individuals' and then click on Family History. That is the easiest way besides bookmarking the page. The new page has been refreshed and looks great. I would get used to this new page and be familiar with it. I am sure it will be updated frequently.

Family History Support for your calling and for members needing help when we aren't available. This is not for research help, but mostly temple ordinance questions and website help with Family Tree. 1-866-406-1830. Easy number to remember, it is the day the church was organized.

There was a question asked on how much do we meet with members? It was suggested that we meet with them quarterly. I was thinking about that and I think it needs to much more than that. And it may need to be as much as the member needs until they get on their feet and feel comfortable navigating around. Remember, we can share with them The Family History Guide website and they can complete self-guided training by following the training schedule that is on the website. (Again, I will cover this in another post.) With that in mind, we do need to keep our skills up and learn new ones. I will forever talk about The Family History Guide as the go to resource to learn/teach new research techniques, learning how to navigate on most of the family history websites and to keep up with what is new.

That will be it for this blog post. There were other items that were discussed in our last meeting but some of the topics deserve their own blog post. So I will be posting those shortly.

Enjoy,
Jill

Blog for the Ward Temple & Family History Consultants - San Bernardino, CA Stake

Welcome to our blog. This will be a landing place for all ward temple and family history consultants in the San Bernardino, CA Stake to keep up on the latest information for our callings and personal research. I had started a Facebook Group, but realized that not everyone has a Facebook account or they don't visit their account very much. That is why I have started this blog. Instead of sending out emails (except to let you know there is a new blog posting), I will post here. This way all of  'my emails' will be in one place and searchable with labels and search box for easy finding of information.

General Conference this past weekend was amazing. If you didn't get a chance to watch, follow this link to get caught up. We had a new announcement which will effect our callings a bit. The High Priest Group Leader position has been retired and we now have both the previous High Priest Group and the Elder's Quorum, combined as the Elder's Quorum. There are three talks that go over the new changes. The talks from President Nelson, Elder Christofferson, and Elder Rasband will go over the changes in more detail.

The main take from this that will affect how we proceed with our callings as consultants is who we will report to. We will no longer report to our high priest group leader, since that position has been retired. There will now only be an Elder's Quorum and I am sure those positions in the next several weeks will be reassigned. With that in mind, we will continue to proceed with our assignments until the priesthood callings have been assigned. We will need to be patient with all involved as they will all have new assignments and it may be a bit before they have a chance to work with us in our callings.

Training Tip for today: We all need to know the 'landing' page on lds.org for your Family History Calling. Here is the direct link. It has been updated. If you are on lds.org you just need to click on 'Families and Individuals' and when the drop down menu shows, click on 'Family History'. Just that easy. No need to go through the 'Calling' section of the site.

Go through the page on lds.org and see what is available so if a question is asked of you, you may not know the answer, but you will know where to find the answer.

There will be additional posts but just wanted to share with you the web address for this site for future reference. The next post will be a recap of our last meeting. Keep an eye out for that later this week.

Enjoy,
Sis. Jill Holmes