Tech Forum

Hi everyone. So we are cleaning up our ward list, there are so many non members on our list, because their name was added when having a child blessing.

For example. If in 1996 a investigator had their new baby blessed, and that child is automatically put on the ward list. Years later they are still on the list, never been baptised, not known at all.

Are they ment to be on there list still?

Can we remove them without any action first?

What the church guidelines on this?


Thanks.

Temporary records for non-members are not maintained by Church headquarters. It only exists on the ward's MLS database. Once the purpose of the temporary record has passed the record may be removed.

You will need to council with the bishop to make sure the purpose for the temporary non-member record has expired and that the bishop wants the record removed.

For the purpose of a baby naming and blessing the temporary record for the child will be deleted once the real record is received from CHQ. If the child has reached the age of eight and has not been baptized then there is a process available to have the record removed. But for the most part a child not baptized after eight years of age but before the age of eighteen should be retained until after their eighteenth birthday. If the child reaches the age of eighteen and is unbaptized then written permission from the stake president must be obtained to cancel the membership record. For more information on Church policy for membership records of an unbaptized person see the CHI, Book 1, p 145-146.

For your example the baby has not reached the age of eighteen yet. Your bishop would need to decide how to handle this situation. The child, now around the age of 14, still has four years to decide to be baptized. I would treat that child as you would any member you have lost and for which you have no address or contact information.

There is some information on temporary membership records in the LDSTech Wiki.

Keep in mind there is a big difference between a temporary records a "child of record". The latter is a full-blown membership record that IS tracked back at SLC and there is a specific procedure to follow to remove the name. You can't just delete it.

Typically when a child is blessed, a "real" membership record is created. But I'm not familiar with a case of non-members blessing their child.

kinggrunt wrote:For example. If in 1996 a investigator had their new baby blessed, and that child is automatically put on the ward list. Years later they are still on the list, never been baptised, not known at all.

jdlessley wrote:Temporary records for non-members are not maintained by Church headquarters.

This doesn't sound like a temporary record to me. If they followed the normal procedure for processing a baby blessing, then the child would actually be a child of record, and the record would indeed be at Church headquarters.

A clerk can easily determine if it the person has a temporary record in MLS by going to Membership Records > View and Update > Remove Temporary Records. If the record is on that list, then it is indeed a temporary record, and what jdlessley said seems to be good advice.

But if it is not a temporary record, then they would have an actual membership record. Once such a person turns 9, they are no longer technically a child of record, but the record would still have to be canceled. In this case, you have two options:

• Wait until the child turns 18, at which point you can use the standard procedure for canceling records of former children of record (see "Cancel Record" in the MLS help file).
• Send a Special request to request cancelation of the record before the child turns 18, since the child has no parents in the Church and is not attending.

For both Alan_Brown and RussellHltn - I continued to edit my post until I got the wording correct to match with both the CHI and the wiki. Your responses to my post probably occurred sometime between my first edit and my fourth edit.

My response was to try and address both the child being blessed and the non-member parents. I made the assumption that the parents had temporary records created along with the record created with the child.