Ancestral Quest Releases New Ordinance Reservation and Tracking System and Helper Access

In a press release dated 24 July 2009, Incline Software announced as follows: "the release of two major new feature sets in its product, Ancestral Quest (AQ). AQ was the first desktop family tree product to interface with New FamilySearch (NFS), and these new features continue to expand the ways in which Ancestral Quest works with New FamilySearch. The first of these is the Ordinance Reservation and Tracking System (ORTS), which allows a user who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) to determine whether the records in his/her personal family tree database have had all the LDS temple work completed, and if not, to reserve those ordinances, create Family Ordinances Requests (FORs), and track the progress of the ordinance work while updating their personal records along the way. The other feature is a Helper Access capability, which allows one person who has access to the New FamilySearch.org website to sign in to help another person, usually someone who does not yet have access."

This addition to Ancestral Quest brings the program up to parity with RootsMagic 4. The newest version is 12.1.18 and has new menu items to support the new features. I had the opportunity, finally, to download an upgrade to my program and go through the new features. Although I did not have any names to process for Temple Ordinances, I found the implementation of the features to be straight forward. I will do a feature comparison between Ancestral Quest 12.1 and RootsMagic 4 as soon as I get an opportunity to do so.