The TBM in my office is all bummed out today. The Mormon overlords had set a goal of 1 Million names during the Month of June to be submitted for temple work. Not even close. Not even by half.

His comment. "Its is a sure sign of the last days. Satan is working overtime to prevent the work from going forward. With the Catholics and Jews closing their records to the church, it make it more difficult to get non census names."

They could just take a list of holocaust victims names and do them, reach the target easy peasy...

Why not just make up names? I'm sure not every John Smith has been baptized. You can take every combination of first and last name and have millions of possibilities. Then you can do each combination a couple thousand times in an attempt to get every person who had that name. That would keep temple goers busy for years.

Why use names? God knows everybody, right?

So one American male and one Americam female could nip down to the temple and be baptised for and in behalf of 'everyone who died in America without being a member prior to 2012'

Repeat this annually for every country and bingo, job done!

Boy, that would really take all the fun out of it.

And the cost!

But then where would they hide the cost of projects like the Mall?

I don't see the point of baptism for the dead. If the dead want to be baptized, they should reveal themselves and ask for it. Otherwise, the resources and time would be better spent helping the living that are suffering and need food, clothing, shelter and other help.

Man, they could really use you up at the COB.

I have seriously asked this question of many people I know that work and volunteer at the temple. I have yet to hear any good answer to it. I point out to them the only reason they seem to need a dead persons name is because they use it as a ticket to ride the Mormon theme park ride called the temple. Without a name, they have no ticket. In almost all cases, they have no idea who the dead person was and can't remember their name five minutes after they get done.

There was a one-day (24 hour) goal of indexing 5 million census records this past Sunday evening until Monday evening.

Many are optimistic that indexing the 1940 census will make countless names available for proxy baptism, but as long as the 110 years rule is in affect, I think very few names will actually become available. BTW the 110 years rule is a person can only do the work for their immediate family unless they were born over 110 years ago. This is volunteer work given to LDS faithful that eventually helps out the for-profit companies that sell access to indexed ancestry records.

Can you show that the results of indexing are used by for profit companies as a way of signing income?

Individual members of the LDS church do own large shares of for-profit genealogical record keeping companies. Including websites, software and other related services. The LDS church does have an interest in these companies in terms of providing names that can be used in the temple.

The church is sponsoring and providing free labor so that deceased ancestor names can be found for proxy work. This free labor also improves the bottom-line of these for-profit businesses which are owned by members who pay tithing and donate to the church.

It amazes me how at one time I thought highly of this practice. It just seems so silly now and another of so many signs of a man-made organization that can't get away from many of Joseph's dumb ideas.

I remember a missionary who blessed all his food in his mourning prayer for the day. I like your thinking, but it just shows again how silly the whole thing is.

I'm not getting it.

If the indexing work ended up as a database for Ancestry.com etc then I'd get it. But it ends up on family search which is provided foc.

Indexing the 1940's U.S. census has to be a monumental task. Each hand-written record is viewed by multiple people to make sure they get the correct spelling right. Very little of it can be simple done by computer and OCR. Seeing how this record was just released by the U.S. archives department in April of this year, and primarily LDS volunteers indexing it, how else would Ancestry.com have what they already have on their website without the free labor provided by LDS volunteers?

I understand the speculation, but speculation doesn't make it so.
Can you show that's what happens?
(I would be happy if you could)

It is speculation, but here are some bread crumbs.

The goal of 5 million names as discussed on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/familysearchind ... 6194804156
http://www.facebook.com/events/156608427806812/

If you will notice on this website:
https://familysearch.org/1940census/?ci ... 940Text_v2

and finally:
http://inflection.com/slope/corporate-a ... escom.html

Hey! Tobin and I agree on something for the second time. I don't remember what the first time was about...