Talk:International Genealogical Index

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This is just personal impressions & conjectures, but it may be verifiable by looking outside Mormon resources: if it is true, someone serious about genealogy or historiography should have done some rigorous research on it.

In a word, IMO IGI (cited e.g. in Jane Lane, Lady Fisher) is valueless for learning facts and should be used only for suggesting directions for research: a large fraction of what is true is going to be there, but mixed with a great deal of speculation, and not much help telling them apart.

Surely a lot of bad genealogical research is done elsewhere, but two factors are, as i understand it, special abt IGI:

1. A lot of Mormons don't start genealogical research until they have begun worrying about dying, and
2. They have every reason to risk a lot of false positives in an effort to avoid any false negatives: up to the limit where they can afford the fees to turn more possible ancestors into good Mormons, why not include everyone with any name corresponding to the unchecked or unfinished branches of their pedigree chart? Leaving them out just bcz you're not sure means that when you get to heaven, some of your ancestors probably aren't going to be there for the big reunion, bcz you didn't buy the ceremonies for them that you could have, because you weren't casting your nets widel enough.

In my mind, the Morman microfilms of the primary resources (birth and marriage records) are a class-I resource, but extending that sense of indispensible and sound records to IGI is tempting but horribly mistaken. Don't add that to the article on my say so, but if studies have been done of false-connection stats in IGI, they can be found and their results should IMO be cited.
--Jerzy•t 06:29, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Sunset for the IGI - Controversy

According to public announcements, IGI will be eliminated as a discrete index with the merger of all of its records into New Family Search (article on this is already started elsewhere). New Family Search has now been deployed throughout the world, except for a portion of Asia. The process of combining entries will then begin. Academic researchers should have some concerns with this.

1. Source footnotes will be lost, hopefully on a temporary basis. One of the most useful features of the Internet version of IGI was hot linking to specific LDS films. Backtracing to the original sources was always a hallmark of the successful management of IGI information. ((source: online documentation))
2. Records which LDS leaders do not want the public at large to see, or members to fiddle with, can simply be made to disappear. ((source: online documentation)) Included in disappearing data will be the time frames in which the LDS ministrations were conducted; in the past these had been a great clue as to the reliability of the records. This is disingenuous.
3. Records combined by patrons will include a mixture of data, some based on reliable info and some not. Evidence with a basis of personal knowledge or primary source will be given the same weight as fantasy.
4. The most useful records of all, the records based on "controlled extraction," may not be identifiable by their unique batch numbers at a glance.

IGI is not now and never has been a source. It is an index. When rolled into New Family Search, suddenly it will be given source weight it never had before. Authors of revisions of this article should be sensitive to the uses of IGI by non-LDS researchers.

For the best current information regarding New Family Search, see http://www.usingfamilysearch.com/documents/manual.pdf - a manual possibly written without LDS church approbation but easily retrievable. Genehisthome (talk) 22:24, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Article Requires Serious Revisions

The International Genealogical Index (IGI) is past tense. It was discontinued by the LDS church for all intents and purposes in December 2008. The article needs to be re-framed in the past tense. A history of its publication can be found here:

https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/International_Genealogical_Index

Further, what IGI truly was has been misunderstood for many years. When published as microfiche, it was much clearer. IGI was an index. But not to the records of the world nor to patron submitted information, as it is now claimed, but rather to completed LDS temple work (which came from many, many sources). At its commencement, the Computer File Index (CFI) was one of two master clearance indexes to temple work that needed to be consulted in the LDS Preliminary Research Survey (the other was the Temple Index Bureau's card file index to completed endowments). Each line of the fiche contained name of the individual, the event type (birth/christening/marriage or several other choices), the date, the place, and three columns headed "B" "E" and "S" (for baptism, endowment, and sealing). Source information in the form of a "batch number" was visible on the far right hand side for each line of data. "Batch number" guides existed that would assist a researcher in tracing back to the original temple entry documents. In my files I have some contemporary photocopies of entire fiches (made for me by LDS reference librarians, quite legally) and many such entry documents. It would be lovely to display some of these as examples, but they would no doubt be suppressed as WIKI images by the copyright holder, Intellectual Reserve Inc. Perhaps Salt Lake City could be persuaded to release a portion of a specimen fiche from the early days.

At the time the CD-ROM edition was released, because of limitations on DOS command language in the program, the data were divided. A choice had to be made within the "FamilySearch" program whether the search for results was to be without LDS ordinance dates ("IGI") or with LDS ordinance dates (called Ordinance Index, or "OI"). This was the first effort to separate the index from its purpose. OI was available to the general public for many, many years.

Now the second effort has been made; IGI has been suppressed. The ordinance information is no longer available to the public, but only to LDS church members. The source information has been largely withdrawn. The value of OI as a denominational reference tool has disappeared. IGI, in its final incarnation, at the end containing 892,761,439 truncated records of completed temple ordinances, and with sources removed or obscured, is still available here:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/igi

Verification of content can be found in this source, page numbers when you're ready:

http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Turned-Fathers-Genealogical-1894-1994/dp/0842523278

Genehisthome (talk) 07:22, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Not IGI specific.

That last paragraph-sentence is not specific to the IGI, but to LDS policy in general. (The IGI has only been used as a tool to see if proxy baptisms have been done on groups of non-Mormons.) It needs to be removed:

"In 2008 The Vatican issued a statement directing its dioceses to block access to parish records from Mormons performing genealogical research.[2]"

And the Catholic Church does not block all family researchers who happen to be Mormon (how would they know, anyway?), but block the organized program of filming records, like by the Genealogical Society of Utah. Your reference #2 has problems, anyway. I cannot turn up a story at the Catholic News Service site on this topic. My guess is that it has aged out. In addition, there is nobody currently found on the site named "Chaz Muth", though there is a Catholic News service contributor named "Chad Muth". Here is an article on a Reuters site blog from 2008 that covers this: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/05/08/catholic-mormon-tension-over-lds-baptism-of-the-dead/

Thank you, Wordreader (talk) 14:20, 28 October 2015 (UTC)