Descendancy research is how to find your cousins who are missing from Family Tree, enabling you to do temple work for them. Here are some steps that I've found very effective. They combine and improve upon the instructions for puzzilla.org and the instructions for the Family Tree descendency view.
Steps
b. Choose a generation where many are born around 1800 or earlier. For about 10 couples in that generation, click on either the man or the woman, and then click “Descendants”. This will result in several tabs in your web browser.
c. Glance through these different tabs and pick one that is the least full (i.e. the most dots near the middle without yellow squares on them). Click on the ancestor in the middle and select “View in FamilyTree”.
d. Click on “View Tree” near their name.
e. Switch to the “Descendancy View”.
f. In the "Show" drop-down uncheck portraits box to be able to see more people at a time.
g. Click on the 3 or 4 in the generations area.
h. Look at the icons. You can think of these icons as a “To-Do” list. Focus on the easy ones until you are comfortable with more:
- Green temple icon: click and request those ordinances.
- Yellow temple icon: Click on the icon to see which person needs more information (dotted boxes). Click on that person on the left side and go to their Person page. Then go to their ordinances tab and see what information is missing.
- If it’s missing a birth or death place, specifying even just the country is enough, which can be guessed by looking at places of other people in the family.
- If the person doesn’t have a birth year or death year, you can put “Before
” based on when they had a child, got married, etc. - If it’s a sealing to parents that is missing a mother, you can add a person named “Mrs.
”.
When done adding the missing information, go to the person’s Ordinances tab again and click “Request Ordinances”.
- Records icon: Click and attach the records. Census records are especially good since they can find missing family members that need their temple work done.
i. Repeat these steps choosing different relatives from puzzilla.org.
