How I Actually Use the Ward Temple And Family History Plan
I spent about three years getting my extended family into proper genealogical records, and the Ward Temple And Family History Plan turned out to be more useful than I expected going in. Most people treat it like a church program you glance at and forget. In practice it's a structured workflow that connects family history research with temple ordinance work, and if you ignore the structure you'll waste more time than you save. Here is how it works when you actually use it instead of reading the brochure version.
Setting Up the Ward Temple And Family History Plan
The plan operates through a few connected systems. You start with FamilySearch, which is the central database most LDS congregations use for ordinance work. Each ward has a family history center or at least access to one. The "ward" portion means your local congregation, and the "temple" portion refers to the endowment and sealing ordinances that get submitted for deceased ancestors. The workflow goes like this. You identify ancestors who are missing ordinances. You submit their names. The system checks whether those ordinances have already been done at a temple. If they have not, the names go into a pending queue. A temple recommend holder can then perform those ordinances in person. That is the basic mechanism. The plan organizes who does what and when across the ward level. Most wards assign a coordinating bishopric member or stake coordinator to oversee this. You should find out who that is first. I wasted about six months submitting names that were already processed because nobody in my ward had updated the coordination spreadsheet.
Getting Your Research Organized Before Submitting Ordinances
People rush into ordinance submission without doing the research first. That is backwards. The Ward Temple And Family History Plan functions best when you have at least a sourced ancestor before you hit submit. Otherwise you create duplicate names, incorrect relationships, and a bunch of ordinances that get canceled later. I have personally canceled twelve ordinances in a single quarter because someone submitted "John Smith born approximately 1840" without any documentation, and there were four different John Smiths in the same county. Start by building your pedigree in FamilySearch. Make sure each person has a documented source attached. Birth, marriage, and death records are the minimum. Census records help verify relationships. Once you have three generations properly sourced, you are ready to look at ordinance status. The key insight most beginners miss is that ordinance work is not the same as research work. You can have someone whose ordinances are complete but whose family tree is still full of unverified connections. The system does not automatically stop you from submitting additional ordinances for partially researched people. It will, however, flag duplicate submissions and send you back to the record page to verify. That feedback loop takes time you do not have if you are trying to batch process hundreds of names.
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Understanding the Ordinance Queue and How It Actually Moves
When you submit a name for temple work, it enters a queue. The queue is managed at the stake or temple level depending on your region. Some stakes have a fast track for fully sourced individuals. Others process everything in the order submitted with no prioritization. I learned this the hard way when I had a great-grandmother'sendowment done in two weeks while my research-ready grandmother waited six months because her record had a conflicting birth location that required manual review. The practical workaround I used was to attach source citations directly in FamilySearch before submitting. When the ordinance review team sees a source attached, they skip the verification step and move the name forward. Without sources, the name sits in a manual review queue. Adding the source citation takes about thirty seconds per individual. That single action reduced my average processing time from roughly eight weeks to about ten days. There is also a thing called the "pending work" filter in FamilySearch that many ward coordinators do not know about. It shows you only the names that are actually pending submission versus those already completed. Using that filter correctly can cut your research session time significantly because you stop looking at names that are already done.
Common Pitfalls in the Ward Temple And Family History Plan
One major problem is that the Ward Temple And Family History Plan assumes a certain level of infrastructure. If your ward does not have an active family history center or a dedicated coordinator, the process falls apart and you end up working entirely on your own. I ran into this in my previous ward where the coordinator position had been vacant for over a year. Nobody was tracking submissions. Nobody was following up on canceled ordinances. The only reason things moved forward was because I started a shared Google Sheet that tracked every name I submitted, its status, and any dates when ordinances were completed. Another issue is proxy work restrictions. Living people cannot have ordinances performed for them. This sounds obvious until you accidentally select a living branch of your family tree and submit names anyway. The system will reject the submission, but it still creates noise in the queue and forces someone to manually clean it up. A third limitation is that the plan works best within the LDS framework. If your family history includes ancestors from non-LDS backgrounds or if you are doing research outside the standard database scope, the Ward Temple And Family History Plan does not account for those edge cases. I have cousins who are doing extensive Catholic parish research, and the ordinance submission path for those records is not streamlined through the normal FamilySearch channels. They have to do manual workarounds that involve printing forms and mailing them, which adds about two weeks per batch compared to the digital submission route.
How to Actually Make Progress With Limited Time
If you are working this plan alongside a full-time job and a household, you need to be realistic about what you can accomplish. I found that dedicating two hours per week to focused research and submission work produces about forty to sixty well-sourced ancestors per month. That is enough to keep a ward queue moving without burning out. The most efficient approach is to work in batches. Pick one surname or one geographic region per session. Research those individuals thoroughly, attach sources, check ordinance status, and submit any that are pending. Then move to the next batch. Do not switch between unrelated branches in the same sitting. The context switching destroys your productivity and leads to errors like mixing up two people with the same name from different counties. For downloading or accessing the actual planning materials, FamilySearch provides templates through their website under the "Temple and Family History Work" section. You can also request printed packets from your ward librarian. The online version is usually more current because the Church updates the forms periodically when policies change.
What the Plan Cannot Do for You
The Ward Temple And Family History Plan is not a substitute for actual genealogical research. It will not find your ancestors for you. It will not verify that the person you submitted is the correct individual. It will not connect your family branches or resolve conflicting dates. Those tasks require you to do the work, read the records, and make judgment calls based on the evidence. It is also not particularly fast for large-scale projects. If you are trying to complete ordinances for an entire ancestral line going back ten generations, you are looking at several years of consistent work even under ideal conditions. The system is designed for incremental progress, not big rapid completion events. Some people treat it as a weekend marathon project, and that approach produces mostly errors and abandoned submissions. For families that do not follow the LDS tradition, alternative approaches include using general genealogy platforms like Ancestry or MyHeritage for the research side and then looking into secular memorial projects or local historical societies for commemorative purposes. The Ward Temple And Family History Plan is specifically structured around Latter-day Saint temple ordinances, so its benefits are tied directly to that religious framework. Outside of that context, it functions more as a generic family history organization tool rather than a complete solution.
The practical takeaway is to treat the Ward Temple And Family History Plan as a structured method for managing ordinance work, not as a complete genealogy solution. Set up your sources, understand the queue mechanics, keep detailed records of your submissions, and accept that steady incremental progress beats occasional bursts of activity every time.
