Marking members as married without creating a nonmember spouse record

The wiki article on nonmember spouses is pretty clear that we need to make sure that we have permission from the nonmember or the nonmember's spouse before creating a nonmember spouse record.

Additionally, when creating a nonmember spouse record for a female, MLS wants the maiden name which we do not always have.

My question is, if we are unable to create a record for the nonmember spouse due to lack of permission, is there any way in MLS to mark a member as married, even without the spouse's information being entered in the system? The primary reason for this is to keep married members from showing up on single adult reports.

You can record the name of the spouse on the member's record. That will flag that member as "married" without creating the non-member record referred to in the policy.

This is the only way I know of to flag a member as married.

Note that despite not creating a non-member record, the new directory on lds.org may still display the non-member. If that happens, you'll have to call CHQ and have that "suppressed".

If my test MLS is any guide, you need the full name of the male non-member, or the maiden name of the female non-member.

mwgrover wrote:My question is, if we are unable to create a record for the nonmember spouse due to lack of permission, is there any way in MLS to mark a member as married, even without the spouse's information being entered in the system? The primary reason for this is to keep married members from showing up on single adult reports.

Yes, but I do not know the entire consequences of changing the individual record as I did in testing this. Using the test data I opened a single female member's record and edited the spouse name on the "Current Spouse" tab. For the spouse name I entered the same last name as the member but entered "Spouse of [member's first name]" for "First and Middle Name(s)". If you have the actual non-member spouse name, that can be entered. For a male member I entered "Unknown" in the "Maiden Name" "Last Name" field for his spouse. The radio button "Is a member?" was left as No. No further information was required. This removed the individual from all reports for singles. No record was created for the non-member spouse and no marriage information was required to be entered.

If you don't want to fill-in dummy data for the field you can send a message via MLS to have the CHQ membership department mark the record correctly. So if not done already create the member's record and just leave the spouse blank as if they were not married. Once the record has been created and assigned a MRN contact CHQ with the relevant information.

jdlessley wrote:Yes, but I do not know the entire consequences of changing the individual record as I did in testing this. Using the test data I opened a single female member's record and edited the spouse name on the "Current Spouse" tab. For the spouse name I entered the same last name as the member but entered "Spouse of [member's first name]" for "First and Middle Name(s)". If you have the actual non-member spouse name, that can be entered. For a male member I entered "Unknown" in the "Maiden Name" "Last Name" field for his spouse. The radio button "Is a member?" was left as No. No further information was required. This removed the individual from all reports for singles. No record was created for the non-member spouse and no marriage information was required to be entered.

I am a stake membership clerk and we have a ward doing this to clean up their YSA and SA lists. It seems to work well but we were concerned they might be violating some church policy by entering a spouse without any marriage certificate or documentation. They are using the sister's last name and Mr. as the nonmember husbands first name. Does this seem like a reasonable solution?

jeffsnoy wrote:It seems to work well but we were concerned they might be violating some church policy by entering a spouse without any marriage certificate or documentation.

I am by no means an authority on this. To get an authoritative response I recommend using the MLS messaging system to send a message to CHQ or call LUS to ask about the proper procedure.

Technically it is possible to enter dummy data into MLS for a member to set the married flag. The minimum required by MLS is a first name for a male non-member spouse and a maiden name for a female non-member spouse. Whether it is appropriate or not is for the Membership Department to provide the answer. The Handbook does specify that a clerk should verify the information when changing a membership record. Normally the inspection of some documentation is appropriate verification. Whether that information must be entered into the membership record for the member, I cannot say.

Entering the spouse name, birthdate, marriage date and marriage place is data used to create both a temporary record for the non-member spouse as well as to establish marriage record information at CHQ. We know that creating a temporary record for a non-member spouse is done to include non-members on organization lists and rolls. However we do not know if the Church considers the member to be married if the four pieces of data listed above are not provided. That may not be an issue for the purposes of the topic of this thread.

An additional factor is the question of what this partial workaround would do to the online directory and its underlying web services feeding LDS Tools, which now harvest the spouse's name from the otherwise confidential marriage record for display and as a component of the household record. (This is not a factor within MLS, where the marriage record is only visible to privileged users and does not appear in most reports.)