Suggestion: Notify 2nd ward when members reside in 2 wards

]I discovered by accident last night that a family, living within our ward boundary for quite some time now, has 3 youth, who are active members of the church. They live with their mom every other week so their records are there, but they live in our ward half the time, & there is nothing that notifies us that they are members living there. After meeting them, I see they'd love to be coming to our mutual/youth activities as well, but if I hadn't ran into them & started talking, they still wouldn't be coming to our ward activities, which means they'd be missing out every other week, as they had been for quite some time. Isn't there some way that when a ward knows they have members residing with them only part time, that their records can be sent, or even just a notification if records can't be sent, so we can be made aware that there are members living there? I would REALLY love that. And I really think it would help our members as well. The church helps people much easier when we know they're there!

I don't see anything preventing the ward that has the records from contacting the other ward about the situation. They're not likely to send the membership records since the members are in their ward. There's certainly nothing preventing the members from initiating the contact. That's how it works for many of the normal moves. The only think I can think of is a official letter asking wards that have part-time "custody" to work with the other ward.

Your bishop or ward clerk can create an out-of-unit membership record for them using Leader and Clerk Resources. That will ensure that they are listed on the appropriate class lists and rolls.

There are too many scenarios for family circumstances to make the best policy to notify another ward. Families have this responsibility. These situations can be extremely fragile for families with many deep hurts involved with church/separation, etc.. Let it play out, I say.

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people are not aware of out-of-unit membership records. This is still less than a year old. Those of us who do know about them can be proactive and communicate with families in our wards about this option. There's a divorced sister in my ward. The records of her children are in our ward. I found out that her children go to church with their father when they're with him and I told her about the out-of-unit option and she was interested in this and asked me about it again. I believe she followed up with her ex-husband and his ward created out-of-unit memberships.

I suppose the church create some type of report in LCR that flags individuals who have children under 18 with church records, but the children reside elsewhere. This might allow the bishopric to follow up about the situation if it's not known.

I'd think a report of individuals who are members of the ward with out-of-unit records elsewhere would be useful in multiple situations. Shouldn't the unit with the membership record be aware that the member has a record in another unit as well? This would make it much easier to contact that other unit to coordinate things - perhaps a consolation before issuing a temple recommend for youth baptisms.

This would clue in the unit with the membership record that the children may not be attending another unit on their "off" week.

mevans wrote:I suppose the church create some type of report in LCR that flags individuals who have children under 18 with church records, but the children reside elsewhere.

I'd lower the age to under 17. Too many 17 year olds go to college.

mevans wrote:It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people are not aware of out-of-unit membership records. This is still less than a year old.

I agree that a lot of people are not aware of out-of-unit membership records. But it's not because the feature is less than a year old. It is has been around for many years, as you can see in a 2010 discussion of this issue: Joint Custody Kids (and there are plenty of other old discussions like that).

Yes, the LCR/online feature for out-of-unit members is fairly recent, and the similar MLS feature had severe limitations because it was not hooked into online systems, except when out-of-unit members had callings. But in the old days, most of what MLS managed was local data, and even with its limitations, the out-of-unit member feature was fairly useful. The newer LCR version is much better in our online world, particularly because the out-of-unit record is actually linked to the real record.

I mention this not to delve into arcane clerking history, but to confirm the point that this isn't a well-known feature, even though a form of it has been around for many years. Thus it is important to make clerks and leaders aware of so that they can use this feature where it will help members in situations where they split their time between wards.