Showing a member is married without adding spouse

[brown67]

Our Stake wants to clean up their young single adult and single adult lists. We have a lot of members on those lists who are actually married to mostly non members. A lot of the cases we know the members are married, but we do not have permission to add the non member spouse. Does anyone know a way to simply show that a spouse is married without creating any kind of non-member record?

[russellhltn]

A lot of the cases we know the members are married, but we do not have permission to add the non member spouse.

Is permission required to add the spouse? I'm not seeing any such thing in the Handbook. Some information is needed. I think you need a marriage year, but don't have to have a date. I'm sure you need the spouse's name, but check to see how much is actually required.

[garystroble]

Our Stake wants to clean up their young single adult and single adult lists. We have a lot of members on those lists who are actually married to mostly non members. A lot of the cases we know the members are married, but we do not have permission to add the non member spouse. Does anyone know a way to simply show that a spouse is married without creating any kind of non-member record?

If the marriage is public record, I don't see why you would need permission to add the information. And there is no way to indicate someone is married without at least a name or a marriage date. A date without a name will come up as an error in a membership audit, but it will put the person into the married list. Preferably put in everything you can find; name of non-member spouse, that person's date of birth if you can find it, marriage date including the year and marriage location, i.e. city, county, state, country, if you have all that information.

[BrianEdwards]

You may also find that if the non-member understands that the only info being added is their name and the marriage date (or whatever the minimum data is), that might lessen pushback. I imagine most non-member spouses would be primarily concerned about personal data such as their own birthdates and contact info. Of course there will be some who simply don't want to be included in any kind of church records, but this might allow for many records to be updated with marriage info.

[davesudweeks]

Not specifically recommending this, but we have a nonmember spouse recorded with a first name as "Mr" in our member list (they are antagonistic towards the church so we don't contact them except to check on their status after local bad weather). This was done many years ago and I don't know if the software will allow it today.

I had success once by reviewing the member's Facebook page (I was not friends with them but was able to determine I had the right person based on information on their page) - I was looking for an updated address and found they were connected to their spouse's Facebook page. Their spouse's Facebook page had their marriage date and city where they were currently living (which let me find their address through another search). That was all publicly available. Another possible source is court records if you know where they were married.

Like looking for family history information for ancestors, you may need to try several different searches on different resources to see if there are details available. Also like searching for ancestors, if you strike out today, try again in a few months as new data may be discoverable that wasn't available when you searched before. It's like putting together a puzzle - you need to be patient while you search for the right pieces that fit correctly.