My name suddenly wrong church wide.

[antiquarian]

Hello,
I've done some digging, but can't seam to find a solution.
My name & my husband's last name are different. When the ward clerk decided to make my DH "Head of Household" the ward directory changed my name! People can't find me as I don't come up in a search; ok fine I'll live with it.

I discovered today, while trying to buy some things at the distribution center, that it's not just the directory, but apparently in the church records!?! I find this unacceptable on many levels. It took us a while to figure out why in the world I would be "declined" as I've been endowed 20+ years & never had this come up before. This has really upset me.

Can someone please explain how to fix this?

Also, in this day and age & programing capability the church seriously can't put people of different names in a household together & make them findable in a search? Most of my friends didn't change their names when they wed & some have children from other marriages so a lot of different names, but one family. They really need to fix that. NOT COOL to assume everyone in the 21st century follows antiquated traditions.

Thanks for any help,
RLD

[russellhltn]

Any fix involves going back to your ward clerk/membership clerk. There are three different names on a membership record: Legal, Preferred, and Household. The Legal should match your legal name. Preferred is less formal and is what you prefer to be called. (For example, your legal name might be Cynthia, but you want to be called Cindy.) The Household name is the name the household as a whole is listed under. I think that's only for the household record.

Anyway, the clerk needs to be sure your Legal and Preferred names are correct. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how different last names are handled, but it shouldn't be that bad. You most certainly can be grouped into a household with your husband without having to change your legal name.

Edit: I checked my ward directory. The household is listed under the "household" name. I don't see another listing under the "other" name. Yes, that could make it hard to find you. But once you click on the household, you see the names of the individuals and their actual last names.

Edit2: I played around with the search on the directory. It doesn't find non-household names. That doesn't seem right. I'll let the developers know about that.

Something you may want to consider asking for - if your husband in a non-member, you might want to ask for the household to be in your last name. Off the top of my head, I don't know of anything against that. I assume there's a reason we have that blank and it doesn't automatically take the head of household without any ability to override it.

[gregwanderson]

Yes, please talk to your ward clerk and/or "membership clerk" to have this corrected. But please note that they may not be responsible for whatever changed (because they're not designing software nor the default settings of that software). Even if they did something to change it, I'm confident that they meant no harm, so please cut them a little slack. And please understand that, for most members of the church, it is still quite common for a wife to take her husband's last name when the are married. My wife specifically wanted to take my last name, and we got married in the 21st century… and she wouldn't want to be criticized for this decision any more than you enjoy being criticized for yours. As we know, a lot of the church's doctrine and practices would be considered "antiquated traditions" by 21st century society at large.

[sbradshaw]

You can use a combined last name for the "household" name in MLS so both of you will be found in the directory (like "Smith-Jones" for example).

[scgallafent]

I played around with the search on the directory. It doesn't find non-household names.

You should be able to search for names regardless of whether they're the household name. They are grouped with the head of household, but they are searchable. I just verified that if the Smith children are in the Jones family, I can search for Smith and they should be found.

[aebrown]

I played around with the search on the directory. It doesn't find non-household names.

You should be able to search for names regardless of whether they're the household name. They are grouped with the head of household, but they are searchable. I just verified that if the Smith children are in the Jones family, I can search for Smith and they should be found.

That's true for children, but not for spouses. If Alice Brown is married to Charles Daniels and they have a child named Ella Finch, then searching for Alice, Charles, Daniels, Ella, and Finch will yield search hits, but searching for Brown will not.

[scgallafent]

Correct you are. Now to figure out who to nudge to make sure it's on the backlog....

[mevans]

We have that situation in our ward. I vaguely remember that this was a problem and had though that the search had been fixed, but I just tested and verified that it doesn't work.

With the international nature of the church, I'm a little surprised the directory search doesn't work correctly. The tradition of the wife taking the husband's name is common in many countries, but not all. The church has a strong presence in many Spanish-speaking countries where this is not the tradition. There's a nice summary of practices in several countries on Wikipedia.

I'm sure it's a bit of an effort to get something that works for all countries. Here are some other forum threads that seem somewhat related to this discussion:

• Preferred names not showing in Directory in Europe
• Directory Filter Problem
• Directory has stray names out of alpha order

[russellhltn]

I'm sure there's a few dents in cubical walls that come from trying to write programs for a world-wide church.

[Biggles]

In one of the recent Directory updates, the Preferred Names not showing in Europe, certainly for the UK, was fixed!