Tech Forum

It would be a wonderful thing if the Church developed something to allow members to find both missionaries they served with and also members they helped join the church or worked with during their missions. Personally, I think this could potentially be a big boon to reactivation as well. I see this problem from both directions:

1. Both of my parents are converts to the Church. Both of them would like to be able to find the missionaries that worked with them, but have no idea how. I'm willing to bet those missionaries would like to know what became of my parents as well. Wherever they are, they have no idea the impact they've had in terms of my parents staying active, meeting each other and getting married in the temple, sending 4 sons on a mission (with a possible 5th to come), or the people those sons have had a chance to influence.

2. In my mission, a lot of the people I worked with were either young singles or young families. Both have a tendency to move. Church policy kept me from keeping in contact with them while still on my mission after I moved out of the area (not complaining here, this is probably a good thing overall). Most of them moved before I finished my mission. For most of these people, I have no way to contact them anymore. I often wonder what has become of them, if they're still active, how they're doing, and if for some reason they've become inactive, if I might not be able to influence them to become active again if I knew how to contact them. I've had more success keeping up with companions, but I've lost some of them as well as we've all moved around.

If the Church could do something here to help missionaries keep in contact with members and companions from their missions after their missions, I for one would be extremely overjoyed. As it stands now, I just look forward to what I sometimes term the "great reunion party" after this life.

I know this will is not a solution to all of you requests, but are you aware of the LDS Mission Network <www.mission.net>? This group started out as an index of websites created by and for returned missionaries back in 1996. It has grown over the years and now lists 358 different sites, that between them list over 188,000 returned missionaries. The group have developed their own custom databases RMdB (Perl CGI / MySQL) and SIB (PHP / PostgreSQL).

Each mission alumni site is maintained by a different webmaster, all include a database of registered returned missionaries, some also include friends of the mission (which is where you may find local members), some also have message boards. So I would suggest you look up the site for you mission. Search out any of your companions and other friends from the time you served and ask them about the members you lost contact with.

wearnshaw wrote:The method that cottrells then suggested was once valid but no longer is. We have been asked by the Global Service Center to remove this because it was causing some "heartburn" over there. If we receive official instructions from the Global Service Center we will update this thread to show them.

It is my understanding that this service and form was recently discontinued by MSR.