Tech Forum

lajackson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 29, 2022 6:39 pm Membership records for the U.S. (and maybe Canada) were kept on a separate system from records in the international areas of the Church.

I believe the membership records where kept at the area office. CHQ doubles as the Area Office for North America.

russellhltn wrote: ↑Tue Mar 29, 2022 7:12 pm

lajackson wrote: ↑Tue Mar 29, 2022 6:39 pm Membership records for the U.S. (and maybe Canada) were kept on a separate system from records in the international areas of the Church.

I believe the membership records where kept at the area office. CHQ doubles as the Area Office for North America.

Now that I think about it, that is probably true. My family membership records were automated in the mid-70s. When we moved out of the United States new paper records were typed up. When we moved back to the U.S. in 1979 the clerk requested our records.

It took four months for them to arrive. Someone had taken the paper records from the country where we lived and entered them again into the automated system at Headquarters. They were riddled with errors that took over a year to correct, so I know they did not just resurrect the original computer records which were correct. And I know that the paper records in country were correct. Ergo, the conversion process was broken.

Thankfully, we have come a long way since those days.

Yeah, I always cringed a bit when I had to pull records from out of country. CHQ had a index, but they weren't the records.

I had a case where CHQ could see the record was in the area office, but the office couldn't produce it. Fortunately, we were able to get the baptism from the historical record so we could have the sister's record created. She was about to leave for her home country where they didn't have a temple (yet) and wanted to get her endowment. She was about to leave in a few months, so there's no way we could have baptized her and got her to the temple in time.

The joys of being a membership clerk in a student ward with international students.

Cool, thanks everyone. I appreciate the info, especially given the fact that outside of church I’m an historian (and I also enjoy Church history), so all of this is definitely interesting to me.

russellhltn wrote: ↑Mon Mar 28, 2022 11:49 am I've seen the hand-written index card from when records were actually kept at the local level. I don't remember seeing any MRN.

I was a ward membership clerk in 1992, so I saw those records also, but trying to remember that kind of detail 30 later isn’t going to happen.