Convert child of record baptism

We recently had a child of record baptized two weeks after her 9th birthday. As they're supposed to, the WML and full time missionaries handled it as a convert baptism. Since the child's record was in our ward, I attempted to add the baptism and confirmation date in MLS only to get an error saying that the person was over 8 when baptized and must be entered as a convert baptism. No problem there, I understand that. But then the error pop-up says to close the page and use the convert baptism link. When I tried that, there was no option to select from existing MLS records. I would have to create a new record. I didn't want to do that because the child-of-record record already existed with a MRN and it would have created a duplicate record.

Since it was technically a convert baptism, do I now need to wait for the mission office to create or update the existing record?

cjbeckert wrote:Since it was technically a convert baptism, do I now need to wait for the mission office to create or update the existing record?

That would be the proper way to do it. But keep track of things. Missions have been known to take ages to do it.

Another thing you might do is electronically fill out the Baptism form in MLS and hand it to the missionaries. This would be easy because all you would have to do is to go to the form, check that is was a convert baptism, click the magifying glass to locate the child's record, and then most of the rest of the form should auto-populate. You can then type in the baptism and confirmation dates and information, then print it off and hand it to the missionaires. Even if they have to hand-write it out again, at least all (or most) of the blanks they need to fill in will have information in them. You can also print out an extra from and keep it on file until the mission office updates the record.

One thing I have usually done with this is to highight the record numbers of the child and parents with a yellow highlighter so that the missionaries don't forget to enter it on their form (if they have to re-do it), and also to hopefully prevent the mission office from creating a duplicate record.

RussellHltn wrote: Missions have been known to take ages to do it.

That's why I attempted to do it myself. The mission office here typically takes 30+ days before a convert membership record shows up in MLS.

I'll give it a few weeks to show up and pester the missionaries if we don't see it.

jbh001 wrote:Another thing you might do is electronically fill out the Baptism form in MLS and hand it to the missionaries.

The missionaries did a good job of making sure I got the ward's copy of the form right after the confirmation, and as a bonus it was completely filled out. But then again, the sister missionaries are usually really good about this--its the elders I have to keep hounding. :rolleyes:

jbh001 wrote:One thing I have usually done with this is to highight the record numbers of the child and parents with a yellow highlighter so that the missionaries don't forget to enter it on their form (if they have to re-do it), and also to hopefully prevent the mission office from creating a duplicate record.

Thanks for the highlighting suggestion. I'll have to do that next time, along with proof reading the information on the form. There always seems to be something in need of correction once the new record shows up in MLS: name misspelled, birth place not correctly formatted, parent missing, etc.

cjbeckert wrote:That's why I attempted to do it myself. The mission office here typically takes 30+ days before a convert membership record shows up in MLS.

Having spent nine months in a mission office doing this (before computers), that doesn't seem unreasonable, although it probably seems outrageous from the viewpoint of a ward clerk. I had to mail all completed recommends/temporary membership records for a given month to church headquarters in one batch and it typically took 45-60 days to chase down the last information for the problem recommends. Average time from the baptism until the recommend was sent to headquarters was probably on the order of 80 days.

I expect that the same problems I faced are still faced by mission offices: delay time in delivering recommends from the missionaries to the office (typically several days, but sometimes weeks), time to check the recommend for errors, time to call the missionaries and have them chase down information to fix the errors. I typically spent 15-30 minutes a day on the telephone dealing with recommend-related issues and had 200-300 in my active file at any given moment.

I'm not saying it's ideal. I just have a unique perspective on the issues a mission office has to deal with to get a properly completed baptismal recommend, so I don't think it's all that bad. And yes, recommends from the sisters typically had fewer problems.