Tech Forum

In our small branch in Chile, we have names of children under 18 who were never blessed or baptized but have membership record numbers. Is there a way to remove these names before their 18th birthday?

Apparently the father, who left the family years ago, was baptized when he was about 10 but he was never active in the church. (He hold no priesthood) It appears that many years ago a clerk visited the father and got the names of his children and added them to the branch records. He apparently never advised the mother of this nor the fact that he was a mormon.

Upon visiting the mother, she claims that none of them have every been to a mormon church and they have no interest in knowing anything of the church.

We are trying to clean up the records of this branch and would like to know of a way to eliminate these records from MLS.

Thanks for anyones help.

Howard wrote:In our small branch in Chile, we have names of children under 18 who were never blessed or baptized but have membership record numbers. Is there a way to remove these names before their 18th birthday?

MLS enforces the policy, which is that records of members of record cannot be canceled until they turn 18. The only way you can cancel a record before they turn 18 is to say that it is a duplicate record, but then you have to supply a valid record number for the other record. That doesn't apply in this situation.

I suppose that someone could contact these people again and discuss their "membership" with them. If they understand that they have membership records and have been told that they can be baptized, but they then choose to have their membership records removed, you could go through the process detailed on the confidential form "Report of Administrative Action" to remove their names from the records of the Church. But that's a lot of work.

Of course, the other option is to wait until they turn 18 and cancel the records. Once such children turn 9 they will no longer be counted on any statistics.

The final option would be to contact your local administration office and explain that the membership records never should have been created, and see if they would be willing to cancel the records in this case.

Alan_Brown wrote:The final option would be to contact your local administration office and explain that the membership records never should have been created, and see if they would be willing to cancel the records in this case.

Given the stated facts, that would seem to be the best plan of action.