Chapter 30
Precious Blessings
On the evening of October 4, 1997, during the priesthood session of general conference, President Gordon B. Hinckley announced the new temple design and spoke of the Church’s plan to use the pattern for several new temples around the world.
“We are determined,” he declared, “to take the temples to the people and afford them every opportunity for the very precious blessings that come of temple worship.”
Richard “Rick” Turley, managing director of the Church’s Family History Department, understood that these new temples would bless the Church and help Saints around the world come to Christ. But the department could barely supply all fifty-one operating temples with enough names for vicarious ordinance work. With temple construction now on the rise, the Church had to change how it did family history.
Part of the problem, Rick and other Church leaders knew, was that preparing names for temple work was time-consuming and costly. In some countries, Church members had to travel great distances to find their ancestors’ names in archival records. Other members had to search long and hard for the information they needed. If the right microfilm wasn’t at their local family history center, they would have to pay to have it shipped, wait several weeks for it to arrive, and then return to the center to view it. A typical roll held about a thousand images, so cranking through each one could be laborious. Few people had time for all this—and not everyone lived near a family history center.
Personal computers sped up some of this work in the 1980s. Early in the decade, Church software developers created Personal Ancestral File, a computer program that allowed people to record, store, and share information about their ancestors and build family trees. The program also made it easier for hundreds of thousands of users to submit names to the temple through TempleReady.
Yet the submission process could still be complicated, especially for people who weren’t used to personal computers. Users of PAF created their own personal database, often resulting in duplicate records when someone submitted family names to the Church. Since these files did not automatically update after someone did temple work for an ancestor, different Church members often performed ordinances for the same person without knowing it.
Such problems troubled President Hinckley as well. Two years earlier, when Rick joined the Family History Department, the prophet had called him into a meeting. He wanted to know whether the Church was doing all it could to fulfill its mission to redeem the dead.
“Rick,” the prophet said, “can you assure me that all of the resources that we’re putting into family history are freeing spirits from spirit prison?”
“I’d like to think that we are,” Rick replied. But he believed the system could be improved.
President Hinckley agreed and asked him to fix it.
With this mandate, the Family History Department needed to develop a simpler way of submitting names for temple work—a process simple enough that more people would get involved. Computers could speed up the process of extracting family information from records and organizing it in a searchable database. But to prevent duplication, the computers had to communicate with each other—something the current system could not do. The database needed to be on the internet.
At the time, the World Wide Web was less than a decade old, and the Church had only a small online presence. It had launched a website without much fanfare in 1996, and some Church leaders remained skeptical of the new technology and had little experience with it. The Family History Department lacked the technical expertise to build the kind of online platform required to host the database. They needed help—and they needed time.
And already the clock was ticking. At the April 1998 general conference, President Hinckley announced that the Church would build thirty temples following the new pattern, in addition to the seventeen temples already under construction.
“This will make a total of forty-seven new temples in addition to the fifty-one now in operation,” the prophet said. “I think we had better add two more to make it an even hundred by the end of this century, being two thousand years ‘since the coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh.’”
“We are moving on a scale the like of which we have never seen,” he said.
The announcement inspired Rick. But now there was an even greater urgency to speed up the Church’s family history work.
The year 2000 was not far away.
In early April 1998, Felicindo and Veronica Contreras went to the Santiago Chile Temple. Felicindo had just been called to serve as the bishop of their ward, and he was concerned about the Saints under his care. Attendance in the ward was still low. He wanted to ask for the Lord’s help in bringing his ward members back to church.
As Felicindo prayed, he yearned especially to help the youth. Few of them attended church regularly, and although fourteen of them were old enough to go on missions, no one was preparing to serve. They were part of a larger trend in Chile, where less than 10 percent of eligible young men were on missions, the lowest percentage in any area worldwide. In his heart, Felicindo longed for the youth to return to church and prepare themselves for the mission field.
A short time later, an eighteen-year-old named Juan came to Sunday meetings for the first time in a while. Juan was a member of the priests quorum, but he usually skipped church so he could play soccer. He was a talented player—good enough that some people thought he could play professionally—and the sport meant everything to him. But lately, he’d felt lonely, restless, and confused. The Spirit was prompting him to return to church and serve a mission. But he felt like he needed a guide to help him make changes in his life.
At church, he asked to speak with Felicindo. “I have decided to get active,” he said.
“I was waiting for you,” Felicindo said. He invited Juan to his office for an interview. They talked about Juan’s desire to prepare for a mission. Knowing that missionary work required young men and women to meet certain spiritual, moral, emotional, and physical standards, Felicindo helped him draw up a plan.
“First, we’re going to prepare for you to receive your patriarchal blessing,” he told Juan, “so that you know what the Lord has to tell you.” After that, they would work on his missionary application. Felicindo also invited him to read the Book of Mormon and pay his tithing. Juan accepted the challenge, and from that moment on, he and Felicindo spoke regularly about mission preparation.
Felicindo worked with other ward members as well. He was impressed by the First Presidency’s counsel that every member have a friend, a responsibility, and nurturing with the “good word of God.” Following new guidelines from Church headquarters, he and the full-time missionaries made sure that people attended sacrament meeting before they joined the Church. He and other ward members also ensured that everyone who came to church felt welcome and returned home spiritually fed.
When he invited people to come back to church, Felicindo encouraged them to prepare to take the sacrament and renew their baptismal covenants. He asked returning members to attend the Gospel Essentials Sunday School class to help them remember basic teachings about the Creation, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, repentance, and other principles of the gospel. And he found ways for them to serve in the ward.
He also arranged for the meetinghouse to be open during the week. He received permission to light the court behind the building so youth could play soccer and other games in the evening. Ward members began using the meetinghouse for home evenings and other activities, like plays and Chilean cultural programs. Felicindo helped organize a ward choir, and their music added to the Spirit in sacrament meeting.
As members of the ward spent more time at the meetinghouse, they started taking better care of it, and their love for the building grew. Soon, Felicindo saw improvement in sacrament meeting attendance. He believed these changes were answers to his prayer in the temple.
A few months later, in the middle of 1998, Mary McKenna, a returned missionary from Brisbane, Australia, traveled to Provo, Utah, to learn more about Especially for Youth, a five-day conference for young Latter-day Saints in the United States. Mary had heard a lot about EFY a year earlier while attending Education Week—a series of classes, devotionals, and other activities for adults and teenagers held each year on the campus of Brigham Young University.
During her earlier visit, she had attended a class taught by Brad Wilcox, a popular speaker and author among English-speaking Latter-day Saint youth. After class, she had stopped to talk with him about Education Week.
“This probably sounds really crazy,” she had said, “but I’m a youth leader in Australia, and we need what you’ve got.”
In the century and a half since the first branch was organized in Australia, the Church there had grown to nearly one hundred thousand members. There were stakes in almost every major Australian city and a temple in Sydney. But many youth were struggling, and some were not going on to serve missions, get married in the temple, or stay active in the Church. They felt disconnected from each other and needed role models who could show them how to stay close to God and live His commandments.
As Brad had listened to Mary talk about the challenges of youth in Australia, tears had welled up in his eyes, and he told her more about EFY. Like typical stake youth conferences, EFY was designed to strengthen the faith of young people. But rather than being run by local stakes, it was sponsored by BYU and supervised by young single adult counselors. Hearing Brad describe how joyful it was for the youth, Mary had felt that an experience like EFY could help young women and men in Australia.
She had spent the next several months working to make the idea a reality. Church leaders in and around Brisbane had been supportive, forming a committee of Saints from local stakes to organize an event like EFY in their area.
Now, one year later, Mary was back in Provo meeting with Susan Overstreet, the director of EFY, on BYU’s campus. The university was unable to sponsor EFY sessions outside North America, but Susan had been helping Mary and the Brisbane committee. She took Mary to a counselor training event and introduced her to other EFY leaders. Meanwhile, Brad Wilcox and another EFY speaker, Matt Richardson, agreed to come to Australia and speak at the event.
Mary returned to Australia, and over the next few months, the committee met regularly to plan the event, with each participating stake taking the lead in planning the food, housing, devotionals, music, and other responsibilities. Stake presidents recommended additional speakers, and Mary found young adults to serve as counselors. Some were returned missionaries, some were preparing for missions, and others had no plans to serve a mission at all. Mary arranged training courses for everyone.
The committee hoped to make EFY welcoming for all youth in the Brisbane area, not just Latter-day Saints. Unlike the program in the United States, which cost hundreds of dollars to attend, the Australian EFY would be subsidized by local stakes so people could attend at a low cost. And while everyone in attendance was expected to uphold Church standards at the conference, the committee encouraged stakes to invite youth who were not members.
In April 1999, Mary and her committee launched the first Especially for Youth event outside of North America at a stake center in Brisbane. Nearly a thousand teenagers from the city and the surrounding area came. When Brad and Matt got in front of the crowd, the first thing they did was lead them in some cheers. The youth were a bit taken aback, but they joined in enthusiastically. It was immediately clear that EFY was not a typical Church conference.
Over the next few days, the youth learned from speakers, sang songs, enjoyed dances and talent shows, and shared their testimonies. Photographers, meanwhile, snapped pictures for a slideshow on the last day.
Mary was thrilled by how much the youth and their counselors enjoyed EFY. Everyone who took part in the event, it seemed, went home with stronger faith in Jesus Christ. Counselors who hadn’t planned on serving missions changed their minds and submitted their missionary applications. Some of the youth who weren’t members of the Church when they attended went on to meet with missionaries and accept baptism. And young single adult counselors returned to their wards wanting to serve in Young Women and Young Men.
Especially for Youth had gone incredibly well in Brisbane—and Mary and the committee were ready to do it again.
On the Pacific island of Fiji, meanwhile, Juliet Toro and her husband, Iliesa, had never had much interest in the Church. That changed when their older children, prodded by Juliet’s Latter-day Saint mother, began attending Sunday meetings and weekday seminary classes. Juliet decided it was time to invite the missionaries over to teach her. And when they did, she liked what she heard.
The Toro children joined the Church in March 1999, and Juliet followed two weeks later. Iliesa, however, continued to show little interest. Fearing her husband would be the only one in the family to not embrace the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, Juliet began praying earnestly that he too would join the Church.
At the time of Juliet’s baptism, the Church in Fiji had four stakes and around twelve thousand members. The Fijian Saints were eagerly awaiting the construction of a temple in Suva, the capital city where Juliet and her family lived. After the Church came to Fiji in the mid-1950s, members often made immense financial sacrifices to attend the house of the Lord in Hawaii or New Zealand. This burden was reduced in 1983, when the Church dedicated temples in Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. Still, traveling to the Nuku‘alofa Tonga Temple, the nearest of the three, remained expensive.
When President Gordon B. Hinckley had named Fiji as the site for one of the thirty new temples, the Fijian Saints rejoiced. Having a house of the Lord in Suva would allow them and the Saints in the island nations of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu to attend the temple more regularly—and with much lower travel costs.
Temple construction began in May 1999, two months after Juliet’s baptism. Around that time, she learned that Brigham Young University was trying out a distance learning program at the Fiji LDS Technical College, a Church-owned secondary school in Suva. BYU’s slogan was “The World Is Our Campus,” and the school’s administrators were looking for affordable ways to bring educational opportunities to more Church members around the globe. The internet enabled professors in Provo to communicate with students in Fiji almost instantaneously.
The program enrolled secondary school graduates in several university-level classes. Knowledgeable student facilitators from BYU would administer the classes in person, while the BYU professors who created the courses would provide online support from six thousand miles away. For a small application fee, students could earn credit toward a university degree.
The program interested Juliet. She and Iliesa had been university students when they first met, but they had left school to work and eventually started a family. For over a decade, Juliet had been raising her children at home. She wanted to further her education, so she spoke with Iliesa about it. He agreed that she should enroll.
On the first day of class, Juliet and the other students introduced themselves. Many were young Church members, just out of secondary school or newly returned from full-time missions. Only a handful of students were in their early thirties, like Juliet.
As classes began, Juliet was worried that she was too old to go back to school. The classes focused primarily on developing practical business skills. Over the course of two semesters, she and her fifty-five classmates would take courses in accounting, business management, economics, English, organizational behavior, and the Doctrine and Covenants. Juliet didn’t think she knew as much as the younger students, and she was nervous that someone might find out how little she knew. The last thing she wanted was to look foolish in class.
On a Thursday evening, not long after school started, James Jacob, the director of the program, told Juliet that she needed to attend a meeting that night at a nearby Church building.
Confused, she followed James to the building. When they got there, she found half her ward waiting for her in the chapel. She then saw Iliesa, dressed in white baptismal clothes. He had been receiving the missionary discussions in secret. And now he was ready to join her and their children in the Church.
Tears of joy flooded Juliet’s eyes. She knew God had heard her prayers. Her family was finally united in faith. And one day, she hoped, they would be sealed in the house of the Lord.
As the Church began its rapid construction of temples, leaders authorized the Family History Department to create a searchable online family history database. The department hired a technology company to develop an online platform and interface, and the Family History staff readied the data for the new website. By September, the tech company had produced a working prototype, giving Rick Turley and his team hope that they could have the database ready for testing in a matter of months.
In the meantime, the team considered names like Ancestors, RootSearch, and KindredQuest for the database. Ultimately, the Family History Department settled on a name they were already using for their collection of databases distributed on CD-ROM: FamilySearch.
As anticipated, the database was ready for testing in early 1999. The new website provided access to the records of four hundred million deceased people and allowed users to share information with others. No one was sure how well Church members would adapt to using an online database for their family history work. But the team built the site to handle five million visitors at a time.
During testing, someone leaked the web address, and FamilySearch.org got more than three million page hits. A few days later, it had eleven million. Stunned, Rick and his team increased the website’s capacity to make sure it was ready for public use on its launch date.
In May, Rick flew to Washington, DC, for one of two simultaneous launch events. While Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the presidency of the Seventy conducted the event at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Rick and Elder Russell M. Nelson conducted an event at the National Press Club in Washington. Rick was pleased with the attention already surrounding the website. By the morning of the launch, it was receiving some thirty million hits a day, all without being publicized. People from every continent—even Antarctica—were visiting it.
“Thank you for making it available through the internet!” wrote one user. “A big time-saver for me. I can work at home and still cook dinner and do the laundry—all at the same time!”
“I cannot praise your website enough,” wrote another. “Starting here, while at home, will save me a lot of time in the family history center.”
The following day, Rick represented the Church on the Today show, a popular morning television program in the United States. He sat in a director’s chair in front of cameras with host Katie Couric. Between them was a computer displaying the new FamilySearch website.
“Tracing our family roots has become a very popular hobby,” Katie said as she introduced Rick to the audience. “Now the world’s largest collection of genealogical records has gone online.”
Katie’s first question was about the Church. “Why do Mormons have such extensive genealogical records?” she asked.
“We believe that families can be eternal,” Rick said. “To allow our members to do research, we collect records from around the world.”
Using the names of one of his ancestors and one of Katie’s, he then showed the television audience how to access the site’s databases and find information about their ancestors. Katie was impressed by how easy the website made it for people to do family history work.
“Do you get charged for using this?” she asked.
“There’s no charge at all,” said Rick.
Within a few days, FamilySearch.org was overwhelmed with about one hundred million hits. The website was off to a remarkable start.