"Name Unknown" Households

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
maethows
New Member
Posts: 30
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:09 am

"Name Unknown" Households

#1

Post by maethows »

FYI... I'm not sure if anyone else has seen this, but I figure it couldn't hurt to document the oddity and its apparent solution.

Sunday morning I noticed that there were a number of households named "Name Unknown, First Middle" (where First and Middle were first and middle names of individuals). Upon further inspection, I noticed that these were all (except one) individuals that had moved from the ward throughout the prior months. The only thing wrong with their names was a missing last name, which was replace with the text "Name Unknown". These names only show up as Households, not Individuals.

Solution: Try to open the Household record. MLS will give you an error message and ask you if you want to remove the Household. Answer yes. Repeat this for each "Name Unknown" household.
maethows
New Member
Posts: 30
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:09 am

MLS Version

#2

Post by maethows »

This was seen in MLS version 2.7.2. It may have been present in prior versions and we just didn't notice.
User avatar
thedqs
Community Moderators
Posts: 1042
Joined: Wed Jan 24, 2007 8:53 am
Location: Redmond, WA
Contact:

#3

Post by thedqs »

Maybe a record of the families were still being kept in the old MLS but hidden? (Could be for archival purposes or something else that only needed the first and middle names).
- David
maethows
New Member
Posts: 30
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:09 am

#4

Post by maethows »

thedqs wrote:Maybe a record of the families were still being kept in the old MLS but hidden? (Could be for archival purposes or something else that only needed the first and middle names).
That was my initial thought as well, except that a number of these records were for multiple individuals within a single household, including children.

At any rate, I wasn't too concerned about them since they are simple enough to remove. I just wanted to document the oddity in case someone else ran across it.
fraserredmond
Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Fri Feb 16, 2007 6:44 pm
Location: New Zealand

Same thing happened to me

#5

Post by fraserredmond »

I had the same thing happen - for me I think it wasn't in any of the main listings, but on the HT households being taught list. Same solution to solve. I think we were on 2.7.1 at the time (or 2.7.2b)
User avatar
Jeremy-p40
New Member
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 2:51 pm

#6

Post by Jeremy-p40 »

mfellows wrote:FYI... I'm not sure if anyone else has seen this, but I figure it couldn't hurt to document the oddity and its apparent solution.

Sunday morning I noticed that there were a number of households named "Name Unknown, First Middle" (where First and Middle were first and middle names of individuals). Upon further inspection, I noticed that these were all (except one) individuals that had moved from the ward throughout the prior months. The only thing wrong with their names was a missing last name, which was replace with the text "Name Unknown". These names only show up as Households, not Individuals.

Solution: Try to open the Household record. MLS will give you an error message and ask you if you want to remove the Household. Answer yes. Repeat this for each "Name Unknown" household.
Very helpful. Thank you for posting this - it corrected the problems in the wards in my stake.
:D Happy to serve
lajackson
Community Moderators
Posts: 11460
Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:27 pm
Location: US

#7

Post by lajackson »

Another way to get rid of the Name Unknown listings is to actually try to assign them to a home teaching companionship. In this case, you will not get any error, MLS will pretend to complete the action, the Name Unknown will be gone, and the Name Unknown will not be assigned to the companionship. No error messges at all.

This seems to be a glitch in the way the program accesses the database. The Name Unknowns are found on the "Households Being Taught" list, where you can select the Assign link, assign them, and they will go away without being assigned.

But the Name Unknowns are not on the "Assign Household to be Home Taught" list if you are in a companionship and are trying to add a family to be home taught.

I discovered this while trying to find a household where it turned out that the reverse is true. The household was NOT on the list of "Households Being Taught", but it did appear on the "Assign Households to be Home Taught" list if I was in a companionship and was trying to add the family to be home taught. Just the opposite of the Name Unknown situation.

My problem is discussed in another thread. Sorry that I do not know how to put a link here so you can enjoy that thread. [grin]
pbhanney
Member
Posts: 51
Joined: Sun May 22, 2011 7:07 pm
Location: Lehi, Utah, USA

#8

Post by pbhanney »

I noticed two things with this "glitch" as I found it this week. I recognized the first names of a lot of the people with "Name Unkown" from the past. I recognized that a lot of them were people who had moved out of the ward and must have given their information to their new clerks who requested their records instead of us sending their records on from our side.

Also, I noticed that it changed our Home Teaching and Visiting Teaching statistics (sometime by seven percentile points). So, going through this processes is worthwhile to go through to see the realistic numbers of Households being (or not being) home taught.
lajackson
Community Moderators
Posts: 11460
Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:27 pm
Location: US

#9

Post by lajackson »

pbhanney wrote:I recognized the first names of a lot of the people with "Name Unkown" from the past. I recognized that a lot of them were people who had moved out of the ward and must have given their information to their new clerks who requested their records instead of us sending their records on from our side.
I wonder if you are on to something here. There may be a difference in the way MLS handles the moving out of a record based on whether the current unit sends the record out or the new unit pulls the record. This might be worth looking into as the developers try to solve this problem.
RossEvans
Senior Member
Posts: 1345
Joined: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:52 pm
Location: Austin TX
Contact:

#10

Post by RossEvans »

This "Name Unknown" problem occurred in our ward recently. I first noticed it in the HomeTeaching.csv export file I exported a week ago, and confirmed today that the symptoms also occurred in the top-level Households screen in MLS. (I don't know if the problem also occurred in the PalmFamily.csv export, which normally includes the same set of households as HomeTeaching.csv, because I have overwritten my local copy of that file.)

The symptom is that suddently we had about extra 30 households with "Name Unknown" as the surname, belonging to members who previously had moved out.

I manually corrected the bad records one at a time today from the Households screen, using a workaround published on this forum: Try to call up each of the spurious household records, then delete it when the pop-up dialog prompts to do so.

I don't know why this problem appeared when it did. My only clue is that this is the first such export I had extracted from MLS since we installed v. 2.9. Does such an install rewrite the database?
Locked

Return to “MLS Support, Help, and Feedback”