2025-10 Oct - Acceleration

Oct 10, 2025 network effect Ambiguity ask for help

Read time: Summary 0.1 minutes | Expanded section: 13.4 minutes | Entire message 13.5 minutes

Summary

Expanded Message

Blessings: When Family History Work Suddenly Accelerates

Science has identified something called the network effect, so I will use this effect to articulate a blessing I have found in Temple & Family History service.

Network effects in genealogical data means the more people and sources entered, the more valuable each new entry becomes (because it’s more likely to connect to other people). Familysearch attempts to find not just “your” family tree, but all of God’s entire family tree on earth; all of humanity. The site experiences nonlinear growth in connectivity even if our adding-people-growth is linear. This is a genealogical network effect — a variant of Metcalfe’s Law applied to ancestral data. Family trees are actually more accurately represented as family networks, which can be represented as graphs, with people as nodes, and linkages between parent and child, husband and wife, as edges.

At first, each of us adds a few family members (our four generations). The familysearch.org tree initially consisted of many tiny, disconnected components (hundreds of millions of little family trees). Graph edges are sparse, and adding new people (nodes) mostly grows isolated clusters. This feels slow at first.

At first, it might occasionally feel like a slow slog. Then at some point, it all seems to suddenly accelerate. At first, every new person we make a page for adds a little to the human network, then as the network grows, the number of possible relationships and sources explodes combinatorially. That’s the feeling of sudden acceleration, when your focus areas in the familysearch.org network crosses some connectivity threshold.

I have felt this when starting at a place one of my family lines lived and adding everyone in that small town’s graveyard to familysearch.org. At some point, I start finding that much of the town are my cousins. I’ve done this for a larger city, a county and for a state too, where my family has lived. I’ve added all with a specific surname (initially to disambiguate them from my surname line). Each time, no matter the scale of the geographic region I use, the same pattern occurs! Linking people suddenly seems to speed up and I find many more connections. This network effect pattern emerges with our work and is rewarding, a blessing. I find cousins I knew not. This approach also helps others find their more direct lines too.

If we charted these connections, with the vertical axis as number of connections, and the horizontal axis as people & sources added, the chart looks like a hockey stick. At first the chart is flat or nearly flat for a seemingly longer time, and then it suddenly jumps upward (the blessing), looking steep or nearly exponential.

This is one of the blessings that comes from Temple & Family History work. That combinatorial explosion of connectivity makes up for the slow part that happened at first. It is wonderful. The same emergent phenomenon (the network effect) repeated as more people got telephones back in the day. It repeated again with LinkedIn’s network as another example. This pattern also applies to Temple & Family History work and is a blessing that happens here in mortality (we help link specific individual people). When we get to heaven and perhaps meet all those we helped link together imagine what that might be like then! This is God’s work and he rewards his helpers. Especially the persistent.

For Family History, Get Comfortable with a Bit of Ambiguity

If you’ve seen or participated in the children’s game of “telephone” where a message is started on one end of a line of children and passed to one person at a time until the last person shares what they heard, then you’ve seen how the content of the message can be garbled a bit.

This happens in a surprising number of historical records (sources). If a county clerk heard the bride and groom’s names, the clerk wrote down what they heard, filtered through their assumptions of how that name might be spelled. So, the spelling may be off in the older marriage records. The same game-of-telephone occurred with old US Census takers converting what they heard through their own brain’s filters and sometimes what they wrote down is slightly different.

Death certificates were informed (informant), and that person is sometimes not even a family member, but one from a neighboring farm.

Handwritten records in cursive depend on the legibility of the writing. We were blessed with some records with wonderfully legible cursive writing. Others, not so much.

So be comfortable with this ambiguity. As you review sources for your people, rather than getting too hung up on the exact specifics, look for the preponderance of the evidence in multiple sources. If you have more authoritative guidance on the spelling, great, use that.

As you get into modern records with ID checks, this is less of an issue. But as you go backwards in time, this is a much more common occurrence that you might expect. Our modern precision in the now came from less precise record gathering and record keeping. Today the census has us complete the data and the form is scaneed into databases. None of that existed in the 1700s or 1800s.

For Many Of Us Humans The Hardest Thing Is To Ask For Help

Life is hard. The Lord blesses us with family, friends, and a Ward social network where we can worship together, work through difficulty together, repent (make a U-turn), and try again. He also blesses us with guidance from Scripture, the Holy Ghost, apostles, and Prophets.

Mortality brings cycles of challenges that we grow from. It might even be expressed as:

Test → Fail → Learn → Grow → Repeat → Become

My use of “Test” here does not mean the whole enchilada (all of mortal life as a test), but the smaller hourly, daily, weekly, monthly tests.

Haven’t we all formed our current judgment (hopefully good judgment) from mistakes we’ve made, repented of, and learned from? Our children are building judgment. We’re often there to hold them while they cry, love them through the difficulty. Just like our God is there to hold us while we cry and love us through the difficulty. I am profoundly and deeply grateful for His love and reliability.

As a child, I heard adults around me say that men had difficulty asking for help more than women. What I have observed is that sometimes we all have difficulty asking for help. Are we more comfortable asking God for help than a ministering brother or sister?

One member of the Church said it this way:

A few weeks after I had my second baby, my husband was out of town and I caught a bad case of influenza. My mother-in-law tried to help me care for my newborn and my 18-month-old, but she had her own health issues and had a hard time keeping up with their needs. Being sick and without my husband, everything was chaotic, and I felt like I had lost control of my life. It was obvious that I needed help. I’ve always struggled to ask for help. Doing so has made me feel ashamed, embarrassed, and incapable. But this experience forced me to understand the deeper importance of this principle.

Then she said this:

The scriptures teach us to “mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:9). And in the gospel, we know the importance of serving and comforting others. But rarely do we accept that we need that comfort at times too. It’s natural to find ourselves on one side or the other—needing help or providing help. So why is providing help rewarding but needing help is sometimes embarrassing?

What are our expectations? I see people in our ward providing help often. In certain callings you see people asking for help more often. Is it God’s culture to not ask for help or is it the worldly culture around us? How is our pride involved with asking for help? Do we judge ourselves if we ask for help? Do we compare ourselves to others? How is that working for us? How aligned with Jesus Christ’s example is that?

That author I mentioned went on to quote 2 Nep 2:8 which tells us that without Jesus Christ none of us can be in the presence of God. We all need His help. She then quoted President Camille N. Johnson, Relief Society General President.

“Jesus Christ is our relief. … So why do we insist on carrying our rocks alone? … Brothers and sisters, I can’t go at it alone, and I don’t need to, and I won’t.”

That author realized that “serving others and allowing others to serve us with His pure love.”

A church education manual says

God has commanded us to be humble and ask for help so we can improve. As a student, you can ask for help from your parents, your teachers, your tutors, and other students. Sometimes it can be hard to ask for help. You may feel embarrassed or worried that others will laugh at you for not understanding.

I have shared this to help you see the application to Temple & Family History.

Story Time

Other relevant asking & giving help stories include:

In a world going through times of uncertainty, pain, disappointment, and heartbreak, we might feel inclined to rely more on personal abilities and preferences, as well as the knowledge and security that come from the world. This could cause us to put in the background the real source of succor and support that can counter the challenges of this mortal life. (Elder Taylor G. Godoy, Of the Seventy, April 2024)

While many perceive adulthood and asking for help as mutually exclusive, it’s important to recognize that everyone needs help from time to time. That’s a clear marker of maturity—and one that ultimately allows us to overcome the obstacles we face.

Suddenly you’re caught in that classic dilemma: push through alone or ask for help? Many professionals default to soldiering on solo, thinking, “I should be able to handle this myself.” It’s a natural response, but often a costly one. While logically we know reaching out beats struggling alone, the internal resistance is real. It’s that nagging voice asking, “What will they think of me?”

Reminder. Current Workflow for Family History:

Think Inputs and Outputs.

  1. Historical people’s information first has to be digitized (others do this).
  2. We index people’s digitized information so the image can be associated with text, which can be found in computer searches. AI is still not good enough to do this by itself.
  3. We link families' data together in FamilySearch.org (each member’s initial target is 4-Generations found and linked. Later we work cousin lines too.)
  4. We attach people’s information (source data) to the right person to help us and others to get to know them better. Attaching more sources also shows our hypotheses about individuals more likely true than not true as we build a clear picture of who they were.
  5. Then, we can get names to take to the temple and offer them the choice of being linked to their families for eternity.
  6. By delving deeper, finding and attaching sources and their small bits of information about our ancestor’s experiences, we get to know our people (both direct lines and cousin lines), and our hearts turn to them. As more original sources are digitized and indexed, more puzzle pieces become available. It’s an ongoing and accelerating effort. When are we “done” knowing someone? We can all go beyond the dates of their birth and death and get to know our people.
  7. We can bless others by sharing with our immediate family and cousins what we’ve learned about our shared ancestors or kin, helping all of us feel more grounded, knowing where we came from. Potentially helping them to turn their hearts to their fathers too.

As Ward Temple & Family History Consultants we are called to help you with HOW to do these things, the Lord has asked that we all do.

Sincerely, Your Ward Temple & Family History Consultants,

During Stake Family Search Center posted hours, our staffing assignments are posted

(our contact info is in the tools app, or see us in church)

P.S. - Older versions of this Ward Message (without names), with some how-to instructions, are at familyhistorystuff.com for your reference. This site is not for profit. The .com was a mistake when .org was intended, and would have doubled the cost to fix the mistake.