Spouse showing as "Other"

[geek]

Unless someone can find something better, I'd suggest using the "special request" feature in MLS and having SLC make the needed changes.

For now, I messaged the membership people in SLC. No reply yet.

[BrainClay]

We just discovered this problem in our ward. We're seeing it a lot when there is a non-member spouse (husband). Here are some of the problems we're seeing as a result of this:

1. Since the spouse is not a "spouse", but "other", the member spouse is indented on the "Directory of Members", just like children are indented.

2. On home teaching reports, only the non-member spouse is listed, not the member. For families where both spouses are members, both are listed. Thus, it looks like they are singles.

I'm guessing that if you ran a report of single adults, it would think these were part of that group. That's a big problem, as we are trying to put increased focus on ministering to this group of people. Looking through our Directory this morning, we noticed dozens of these types of families.

We need a fix for this - it's not just an annoyance. Any word on if a fix is in the pipeline?

[mkmurray]

I realize this was over a year ago, but I didn't respond to it the first time around for some reason, but it bothers me now, so here goes...

..We tried many things to get it corrected. I don't know if this is the correct way to resolve this situation, but this worked:
...
3. Terminate the marriage as reason unknown.
...

I would seriously discourage this step. Under no circumstance do I feel comfortable using the Terminate Marriage functionality to fix this. I would always choose to MLS Message Church Headquarters first before trying something drastic like this. "Unknown" is not a reason for terminating a marriage in this way. If there had been, "need to fix bug" or "clerical error" then that's a different reason.

You really have to be considerate and take into account that Church Headquarters may be tracking this history. I would hate to put some kind of termination to someone's marriage in their history like that.

[mkmurray]

We just discovered this problem in our ward. We're seeing it a lot when there is a non-member spouse (husband). Here are some of the problems we're seeing as a result of this:

1. Since the spouse is not a "spouse", but "other", the member spouse is indented on the "Directory of Members", just like children are indented.

2. On home teaching reports, only the non-member spouse is listed, not the member. For families where both spouses are members, both are listed. Thus, it looks like they are singles.

I'm guessing that if you ran a report of single adults, it would think these were part of that group. That's a big problem, as we are trying to put increased focus on ministering to this group of people. Looking through our Directory this morning, we noticed dozens of these types of families.

We need a fix for this - it's not just an annoyance. Any word on if a fix is in the pipeline?

Now as for if Church Headquarters will be fixing the software, I don't know. But I remember having this problem and I think it's very fixable.

If I remember right, you don't do anything to their marriage. What you do is play around with the household grouping. I think what you want to do is move the spouse that has a status of "Other" to a new household all by them self. Then you go move that spouse back into the original household. That seems to refresh the logic and figure out that the spouse is really of the status "Spouse" again.

Give that a try and report back your findings. Good luck.

[aebrown]

We just discovered this problem in our ward. We're seeing it a lot when there is a non-member spouse (husband). Here are some of the problems we're seeing as a result of this:

1. Since the spouse is not a "spouse", but "other", the member spouse is indented on the "Directory of Members", just like children are indented.

2. On home teaching reports, only the non-member spouse is listed, not the member. For families where both spouses are members, both are listed. Thus, it looks like they are singles.

I'm guessing that if you ran a report of single adults, it would think these were part of that group. That's a big problem, as we are trying to put increased focus on ministering to this group of people. Looking through our Directory this morning, we noticed dozens of these types of families.

We need a fix for this - it's not just an annoyance. Any word on if a fix is in the pipeline?

If you look at this post, you'll see that there are basically two ways in MLS to create a part member household.

1. Adding a wife to the non-member husband's household. This gives the undesirable result of the wife being listed as "other", not as "spouse"
2. Adding a non-member husband to the member wife's household. This gives the hoped-for result -- the husband becomes head of household and the wife is listed as a spouse.

This topic has been discussed at length. If you are patient, you may want to review these threads:

Non Member Spouses
Spouse Listed at Other

[mkmurray]

Now as for if Church Headquarters will be fixing the software, I don't know. But I remember having this problem and I think it's very fixable.

If I remember right, you don't do anything to their marriage. What you do is play around with the household grouping. I think what you want to do is move the spouse that has a status of "Other" to a new household all by them self. Then you go move that spouse back into the original household. That seems to refresh the logic and figure out that the spouse is really of the status "Spouse" again.

Give that a try and report back your findings. Good luck.

Yeah, Alan_Brown has a better answer. I missed where you said it was a non-member involved. My solution may be for a completely different (perhaps slightly related) problem.

[Jimmer-p40]

On the household record, have you tried simply removing the wife (and creating a new household), and then moving her back in? It seems to me that by breaking and resetting the link of the records within the household could fix the problem. Just a thought - let me know if that works.

Sky is close on this one. The fix is to assign the spouse to another existing household and then add her back in as the household spouse.
This should do the trick

[BrainClay]

Sky is close on this one. The fix is to assign the spouse to another existing household and then add her back in as the household spouse.
This should do the trick

Thanks, we'll give this a try, and let you know - probably sometime next week.

[rmaughan]

Are clerks still seeing this problem with part-member households?

We have a ward in our Stake that has over 30 part member families and the ward clerk has had to consistently *fix* the "spouse showing as other" problem everytime he gets a new version of MLS or a unit refresh. It's getting *very* old and frustrating for him.

I think it's a sync problem in the software between the local database of non-members and the unit database from Salt Lake. However, it seems to not affect those households where there are more details than just the name of the non-member spouse in the Marriage information (i.e. birthdate, marriage date, location, etc.).

Rob