Information on Family Group Records
Information on Family Group Records & LDS Ordinances




The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has always placed a great deal of emphasis on knowing who your ancestors are.   They had a program in place for a long time ( I have no idea how long.) where their members were supposed to submit their 4 or 5 generations of family group sheets.  Some members did a lot more than that.  Some took books like the one by Edmund Dana Barbour and compiled them onto family group sheets.  (I'm sure that some of the research came from Orange Chapin's Genealogy Book.)  These very old family group sheets only had about a 1 inch square for documenting sources so the sources are rather cryptic and don't always make much sense.  The newer ones had about a one-inch strip at the bottom of the legal-sized sheets.

These family group sheets are arranged alphabetically.  They are easy to read for the most part and best of all, they were linked!  Where one of the parents had an asterisk * or star, it meant they appeared as a child with their parents on another group sheet.  I followed countless families back.  If the children had an asterisk * then that meant that the child appeared as a parent with their spouse on another family group sheet.  I didn't collect as many collateral lines as a I could have.  I wish now that I had done more of these.  I do have photocopies of most of the family group sheets and if you want me to look up the sheet to see whether or not there is a family group for your member of a family, I can do that--as long as the source or notes say that I got it from a FGR (family group record) in the FHL.

When I was new at documenting, I just put the FHL library film number of the microfilm in the notes of my computer program.  There was more written on the sheets, but faced with the monumental tasks of entering thousands into the computer, I chose not to do it.  I wish now that I had.  The program that I first used, PAF or Personal Ancestral File put out by the LDS Church, only had a NOTES section to put documentation in.  There weren't any source files at all until this most recent version of PAF.  You'll notice that most of my documentation is in these note files rather than in source files.  At some point I'll get them all converted, but I don't think it will be anytime soon.

If you are LDS and want Ordinance information I can send you gedcoms with it on there.  At any rate, I do have more documentation on some of these families.  At some point I plan to go back and redo the notes to be sources and I'll have the original source information from the family group sheets in the new source files.