Tech Forum

Attn: Membership Clerks

If you have you ever been received records for an new household in your ward with no address, no phone number or missing both?

Here are some links which are very useful to chase down the missing bits of this public record data:

U.S. Public Records search via Ancestry
U.S. Phone directories via Free411 or ZabaSearch

Hope this helps!

Thanks for that tid bit Daddy-O. A couple of others that I use are www.whitepages.com and I use our county property appraiser website. I find the property appraiser extremely helpful as with it you can tell if the property is a rental or not and if the names on the membership record match the names of who owns the house. I would suggest that all clerks check and see if the county they live in has a Property appraisers website and see if it would benefit them or not. I also frequently use www.usps.com and I click on the zip code locater. Entering the house # street address and city has allowed me to make many corrections to our ward roster. If the street is off by something as simple as ave, or cir. the zip code locater will frequently catch it and give me the correct information. I find here in Florida that often the street names on a map are off from what the post office has them as Ie circle being street or vise verca.
Another fun thing here is when another city takes over jurisdiction of another and an address that you have changes cities. The USPS website will generally catch that for you too. The downside is typing all the addresses off of your roster into it is time consuming. I think it is worth it though.

This is a site I like to use when I'm trying to find someone through a relative listed on their membership IOS
Look at the names of sons and enter them into this database. Now compare the birth date given on his parents IOS. This will narrow down your search when looking for a John Smith in your other popular search sites. This works good for me when I get older members that move out and go live with their children.
http://www.birthdatabase.com/cgi-bin/qu ... =Moss&age=

One of the most difficult dates to get are divorce dates. When you want to get your membership records up-to -date, and show a divorce date of one of your members. When you ask for this date, a lot of times they tell you they don't know it right off and they will let you know when they look up in their legal paper work.

This site only works for people in Utah but many of the states have sites like it.
http://www.utahsright.com/index.php

Often, newspaper websites have indexes for marriages, divorces, obituaries and the like.

Another useful site is http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ . It's the same index you'd find in a family history center, but online. To me, if the person you're looking for is (or would be) at least 60, you should at least check there. It's all part of "trust but verify" - sure, if you're membership clerk, you can assume the data in MLS is right, but you have the obligation to make sure it's current.