Lost Sheep: Contacting Family Listed in a Membership Record

We're trying to find some Lost Sheep. The checklist of what we must do before sending records to SLC with no known info includes "Contact all known family Members".

We will often find in their membership record names of family members that have been sealed to them years before (children or parents), or are otherwise obviously members of the church. So we then "Know" who their family members are but we DON'T know their contact info, but SLC probably knows where these memership records are.

AFTER we have exhausted all other efforts to locate the members, Is it our job as clerks to:

• 1) Ask SLC to send us the contact information for these relatives so that WE can call them?
  2) Ask SLC to contact the relatives for us, or
  3) Send the records to SLC then presume that they will try to contact these extended family members for us.

Calling Salt Lake about these family members, they will only provide the unit where the records reside and the contact information for the Bishop/Branch President of that unit.

This question on the checklist has to do with wards that have other members of the family residing in the same unit.

If this is not the case, then send the records to Salt Lake. They will go ahead and contact the member's known family (through the unit leader).

I agree with sghall: You need to contact all known family members in your area, or of which you already have contact information. It will be SLC's responsibility to contact known family members of other units once you send it off as "address unknown".

Thank you

It does help to have some feel for the extended families in your ward and stake. That way if someone flies the coop (or the newspaper prints information about one of them) you can know who to contact, make sure records are in the right place, etc.

If you don't have that kind of know-how about a member's family, you can always (in the US) try whitepages.com with the names on his or her record.

One other thing i have found that helps sometimes. If they are of age to possibily own a home. If your county government has online acess to their files. You can run the name and find them that way too.

I work for my county, so I can do that by name - at work. I can also access the county Recorder of Deeds site for buying/selling history. For the two counties my stake primarily lies in, it's possible for anyone to do that by address. If the member used to own the property and has sold it, you know they're not there now. And if the member rents (or rented), at least you have the landlord's information.

My generation (25-50 or so) has tended to marry later, and buy homes later in life than the previous generation. That makes us harder to pin down. And it makes the membership clerk's role as undershepherd all the more important.