Annotations

How long do annotations stay on a membership record? The question came up in Bishopric meeting when the Bishop was going over a temple worker application question which was "has the applicant ever had an annotation on his membership record." The Bishop asked me, as the Ward Clerk, where he could find that information. I didn't know the answer.

The simple answer is that annotations stay on a record until they are removed. That could be for months, years, and even decades.

It's easy for a clerk or bishop to see if there is a current annotation, simply by printing or previewing the membership record (not the IOS, but the actual MR). But once an annotation is actually removed, there's no way to see on the membership record itself that there was such an annotation. To answer the question of whether there had ever been an annotation, your options would be for the bishop to ask the member or to contact the confidential records department.