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My wife was doing Family History research on her Great Great Grandfather in New Family Search and found, under ordinances, that he was baptized in 1902. The source shows "LDS Membership Records."

He was born in the early 1830s and was not from the side of her family that had any other members of the church. Unfortunately, after a divorce, the family lost contact with him and does not know when or where he died. How can we find out if he joined the church while living? Is there a way to access membership records for long dead ancestors? We are anxious to know what happened!



Any help would be appreciated.

mschellman wrote:My wife was doing Family History research on her Great Great Grandfather in New Family Search and found, under ordinances, that he was baptized in 1902. The source shows "LDS Membership Records."
...
How can we find out if he joined the church while living? Is there a way to access membership records for long dead ancestors? We are anxious to know what happened!

The only publicly available information on membership records is where you found that record: New FamilySearch. But in my experience, for NFS information that came from membership records, there is more information than just a baptismal date. You should also be able to find the birth date. For most members, a death date will also be recorded, unless he completely lost contact with the Church by that time. Just look at the Details area and look at all the information and the various sources for each detail. Also it can help to look for Possible Duplicates, since the birth, death, and other details may be on separate records that have not yet been combined with the record you are looking at.

Clearly it's important to know if he died before or after 1902. That will tell you if he was baptized when he was alive, or by proxy after he died. Sometimes by looking at the source information, you can also learn some additional details.

I think you'll get better advice posting in the [url=http://forums.familysearch.%20org]familysearch forums[/url]. Since the data came from "membership" and not "temple", I suspect he was baptized in life. But the experts in FS would be able to give a better interpretation.

Here's a wiki article that should be useful in this case:
https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/LDS_Membership_Records