I've never been a mormon or held a calling but a friend of a friend is knee deep in "extractions". As a member of the "Extractions Committee", she apparently feels under enormous pressure to produce 'x'number of names for proxy baptisms.

Has anyone served on this kind of committee? What directions are given for fulfilling this calling? Are they in fact given limits as to whose names they can submit?

for years as a calling.

Well, you can only submit names of people whom you are a direct descendant of. Right? So I'd say it's pretty unlikely the extraction people will be coincidentally running into the names of their ancestors in the birth records, death records, and census lists that they're extracting names from. In that case, I assume this is not a church sanctioned activity. Or the church authorities who have told the media that members are instructed to only submit their own direct ancestors are lying.

My in-laws did this for years. They had some goofy machine in their basement to do the searches on.

It is a LIE that members are only supposed to submit names of their ancestors from their own genealogy.

My in-laws had this calling for years. They got records from all kinds of things and went through them looking for names. H3ll, even if the name or birthdates was not legible, they would guess what it was and add it. (Is that Saul or Paul? Oh well, God will fix it if we get it wrong.)

I was taught that Mormons go through the records trying to do the work for everyone who is feasibly possible to have existed. It's the "do all we can do" idea. Then in the afterlife, all the ones who didn't get identified will get their work done or whatever.

Supposedly the church has all those records in that mountain vault, right? Do they expect us to believe those are only records related to identified ancestors of Mormons? All the records related to the extraction work done by people like my in-laws generated names that got submitted.

I guess they could argue that going back in time, everyone has common ancestors so that's why everyone has genealogy going back to Adam (eye roll).

What a colossal waste of time.

In the last several years, the Church has started an "indexing" program where people "extract" names from census records, marriage records, birth records, ect... you get the idea. There is an actual calling for this as an indexing specialist however anyone who is a member can do this work.

I don't recall any of the "rules". However, as she explained it to me she just went through European birth and death records and wrote the info down on index cards made for that purpose. It seems that a lot of the records were through other religions, consider that's how a lot of recording keeping was done. I assumed that all the names were then used for the temple ordinances. With all the controversy about proxy temple work, I have been wondering about it. I wish she was here to ask. Because if all the "extracted" names are used in the temple, then they definitely aren't sticking to names submitted by family.

but didn't want to say anything--just in case I was wrong--until others responded.

My mother's genealogy was pretty much done back many, many years (even if her mother was a convert) and she was paying other "professional" genealogists to do more of the work. My mother did extraction FOR YEARS and it wasn't for extracting family names.

My daughter is in a genealogy class now and she was rather shocked how much genealogy has been done on my mother's and father's lines. She was disappointed there wasn't anything for her to do (especially baptisms for the dead--as she does those weekly).

Indexing is the process of transcribing original documents; birth, death, marriage records, whatever. It is an exacting process stressing accuracy. They are checked and double checked for accuracy.

I imagine genealogists use those transcribed records to find their own ancestors.