Tech Forum

My wife serves as a ward FH consultant and during our block today she ran into a problem during an attempt to assist an elderly member of our ward in the creation of her own account on New Family Search.

After the account was completed and the member finally logged into NFS we noticed that there were no entries in the pedigree. Even her own name was missing, which is unusual. It's not unusual that there are a limited number of entries as many times those with new accounts must search for and make a connection to their ancestors.

However, we've helped many other members of the ward with their accounts and always found at least one entry - the name of the member - already in the database.

The sister ultimately entered her own information manually, but I can't help but believe that something may be amis. I've send an Email to familysearch support to see what their response is, but I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this?

While this definitely sounds like a glitch between the membership database and the nFS database, I would try making some innocuous tweaks to the membership record to try and trigger and update or refresh. An example of an "innocuous tweak" would be any spelling correction to the member's name, maiden name, or birthplace, or changing the birthplace state from being spelled out to an abbreviation and then back again (e.g. Utah to UT then back to Utah).

Another change that might trigger an update between the two systems would be to see if there is any change that can be made to the member's parent's information in MLS. For example, adding missing birthdate information, adding missing middle names, or making spelling corrections (e.g. from John Doe to John Q. Doe or John Quiggley Doe).

jbh001 wrote:While this definitely sounds like a glitch between the membership database and the nFS database, I would try making some innocuous tweaks to the membership record to try and trigger and update or refresh. An example of an "innocuous tweak" would be any spelling correction to the member's name, maiden name, or birthplace, or changing the birthplace state from being spelled out to an abbreviation and then back again (e.g. Utah to UT then back to Utah).

Another change that might trigger an update between the two systems would be to see if there is any change that can be made to the member's parent's information in MLS. For example, adding missing birthdate information, adding missing middle names, or making spelling corrections (e.g. from John Doe to John Q. Doe or John Quiggley Doe).

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll hold them for a couple of days and see what response I get from FamilySearch support. In the meantime I may take a look at the membership record and see if there are any pecularities.

It took over a week before I had a response from Church HQ, but they Emailed me back today and said that the problem had been resolved. Unfortunately, they didn't mention what was done to resolve it.

The sister for whom we were helping with NFS now has a pedigree showing instead of just her own name, which she had to enter manually.

If I can get a response as to what the resolution was or what caused the problem, I'll post it.

Edit: "It was a data conversion problem that occured when moving information into new FamilySearch. Hopefully you won't see it again." - familysearch support. 5/6/09