MLS priesthood status & LUWS removing members

has anyone recently had issues with the MLS removing priesthood records. My ward clerk was talking in Bishopric meeting about how we lost a number of High Priest records of whom ordained them to the office of High Priest.

And today, I was looking to call members who are to meet with Bishop for tithing and noticed some people were missing from my online membership directory (LUWS) (which if i recall right syncs with the church HQ mls)

MonteLDS wrote:has anyone recently had issues with the MLS removing priesthood records. My ward clerk was talking in Bishopric meeting about how we lost a number of High Priest records of whom ordained them to the office of High Priest.

And today, I was looking to call members who are to meet with Bishop for tithing and noticed some people were missing from my online membership directory (which if i recall right syncs with the church HQ mls)

If I understand the situation correctly, there was a period of years (the late 90's or early years at the turn of the century?) when the Church decided it wasn't important to record who performed the priesthood ordination within the Church's central database records. This has been taken back and that information is being currently recorded on Church Headquarters membership records, and this process has been fixed for a number of years now.

In our ward, we have a sizeable (but not majority) of records that don't have who ordained the men to be Elders in the Melchizedek Priesthood. We are using Tithing Settlement time to show the members their Individual Ordinance Summaries to try and fill in some of those blanks.

Someone correct me if I have misunderstood the issue that took place a few years back regarding the missing data for person performing the priesthood ordination.

MonteLDS wrote:has anyone recently had issues with the MLS removing priesthood records. My ward clerk was talking in Bishopric meeting about how we lost a number of High Priest records of whom ordained them to the office of High Priest.

And today, I was looking to call members who are to meet with Bishop for tithing and noticed some people were missing from my online membership directory (which if i recall right syncs with the church HQ mls)

If I understand you correctly, you're asking two questions. The first is relative to missing priesthood ordinations and the second is missing records in the LUWS (local unit web site) - correct?

The first of your questions was addressed in the previous post. I can't help you with the second post, as I've haven't noticed any members missing. However, it's not something that most members would be doing - that is comparing the two lists.

Now that my curiosity is peaked, it's something that I may check.
Perhaps others have noticed a problem.

I'm not entirely sure what has been "lost" here. mkmurray is right in that for a period of time, the "ordained by" information was not collected. However, I think the status of HP and the dates should still be there.

As for members missing from LUWS, keep in mind that the LUWS admin can remove names from LUWS, typically to satisfy the member's concerns about being listed on a website. Also LUWS doesn't support having families with of individuals with different last names. All members of the family are listed under the last name of the Head of Household. So if you're looking for John Brown, but he's listed as a child of Bob and Julie Smith, he'll be in LUWS under "Smith".

Other then that, all members in MLS should be in LUWS. If not, then there's a good chance that your records are not matching what Church Headquarters shows for your ward.

what i thought was"lost names" on the records ended up that some peoples records had been updated with new legal names.. so my mistake there.

it was just really odd that we lost 6 peoples names of who had ordained who. it was really random.

MonteLDS wrote:what i thought was"lost names" on the records ended up that some peoples records had been updated with new legal names.. so my mistake there.

it was just really odd that we lost 6 peoples names of who had ordained who. it was really random.

MonteLDS,

Thanks for the update. Glad to know that it's working.

MonteLDS wrote:it was just really odd that we lost 6 peoples names of who had ordained who. it was really random.

This would be very unusual. If the name of the person who performed the ordination was there, it should still be there.

It was during the 90s that the Church stopped recording the name of the person performing the ordination. I do not remember the exact dates, but it was around 1991 or 1992. By 1999 we were recording them again.

There were two reasons. One was data storage availability (seems silly nowadays, but was a concern back then). The other reason had to do with priesthood line of authority.

During the period of no recording, it was felt that recording of priesthood line of authority was neither required nor necessary. The feeling has since changed, and this information is being recorded again.

Oddly enough, this was a time when many clerks were not very diligent in cleaning out old files in clerk's offices. So much of the information was available when the decision was made to add the names back into the membership system. Not all, but most, I think.

And now we record them again. And with that information, we can trace lines of authority again. It is not a requirement for exaltation, and there are still a few holes in the database. But it is very nice information to have, and now we are asked to maintain it again.

I have been involved in some very special occasions where the ability to share my line of authority has been helpful in helping members understand the importance and significance of priesthood authority.

5 of the 6 people recalled who ordained them as High Priest and that was fixed.

I know the one left was ordained a HP during the 90's when he was called to be in the Bishopric of a YSA ward. So I think my clerk is going just leave it blank.

MonteLDS wrote:I know the one left was ordained a HP during the 90's when he was called to be in the Bishopric of a YSA ward. So I think my clerk is going just leave it blank.

If you have the date (you should), you might be able to get with the stake presidency or executive secretary and figure out who was around to do it. That might jog some memories.

Otherwise, yes, just leave it blank for now if the member no longer has (or never got) a certificate of ordination.

MonteLDS wrote:5 of the 6 people recalled who ordained them as High Priest and that was fixed.

I know the one left was ordained a HP during the 90's when he was called to be in the Bishopric of a YSA ward. So I think my clerk is going just leave it blank.

If you cannot obtain the exact date of ordination and no paperwork is available to substantiate the ordinance, then locate two other priesthood holders who were present and get the date as close as possible. This is acceptable and will at least put the ordinance on his record.

I had to do this many years ago when I was membership clerk and the records of a Seventy ordination were lost. We got it as close as possible with the testimony of two witnesses who were present.

lajackson wrote:There were two reasons. One was data storage availability (seems silly nowadays, but was a concern back then).

I don't know as that was the driving concern. I had heard it was an outcome from an effort to simplify record keeping. Keep in mind at that time we were recording who did the baptism, blessing of a child, as well as all Priesthood ordinations from the beginning for each record. And we were doing this for the proxy work as well. That's why the recommends with the mag stripes were in use - to automate the tracking of who the proxy was.

I was a membership clerk at the time, and the story I was told is that the church had spent some bucks on consultants who specialized on "reduce and simplify", to take out the bureaucratic bloat that invariably invades any organization. Apparently as part of the process it was decided that all those particular details were unnecessary.

Membership records had been computerized for some time at SLC. I don't know if they were pushing up against some expensive upgrade or not. I'm sure they enjoyed the space savings when the new membership record format went into effect.

We received note from our stake clerk a few months ago asking our help in trying to fix this problem. What they told me was that it was from 1993-2001 that this information was not recorded.

We had a list in our ward of 22 people whose ordination info was not captured. One was myself so that one was easy . We're down to about 5 now. It is interesting to me the number of people that have no idea who ordained them.