Finding/correcting deceased members records.

We have a Sister in our ward trying to get information on a deceased brother. When researching his records it doesn'the show that he was Born in the Covenant,baptized or received the Priesthood. All of which she knows was done. She doesn'the believe he had his name removed from the church records. Is there a way to research this.

I would check and see if you might be looking at a duplicate record, and Local Unit Support will probably be able to help you determine that.

Otherwise, there is really no way you can do much else at the local level. If there is another record, it may have the information recorded. Otherwise, unless the events happened in your ward and you have certificates or witnesses, it might be easier to set up an appointment at the temple and take care of the work there after he has been gone a year.

Is this sister doing her research through FamilySearch because her brother is deceased and the information is now there? She would not have access to any actual membership records, which should have been sent to Church headquarters at the time of her brother's death.

I have one suggestion that might help with the BIC issue: send a request for help on FamilySearch's Family Tree web application. Supply the Person IDs for your brother and his parents, their marriage date and temple, and his birthdate. State that you believe he should show up as BIC but is not. Ask that they check and correct the BIC flag.

FamilySearch has had a problem fairly recently that caused a number of deceased people who were BIC to show up in the database as _not_ BIC. A couple of my deceased ancestors were in that situation. With both of my ancestors, I submitted a request for help. Within a couple of days, I received a reply from FamilySearch that the case had been sent to a special division or department that is working on fixing the BIC status flags. For one case, within a few weeks, I received a message back that the BIC status had been corrected. It did not take much longer than that for the other case, but I could not find where I had been notified about completion.

From one of the replies I received, it sounds like FamilySearch ran an automated clean-up job on the database to clear some ordinance 'Completed' flags where those flags had come from GEDCOMs uploaded by patrons, but the automated job incorrectly cleared some BIC flags as well.

Hope that helps at least with that part.

I also had that same situation arise in my family. Of the five children my paternal grandparents had, only one showed BIC, even though my grandparents had been married in the Salt Lake Temple on 1907, and their parents and their grandparents had all been sealed as couples when they were married. To make matters even worse, three of the four who did not show BIC had had their work done vicariously. I caught the problem just a couple of years ago (all had passed away by that time) and I did the same thing rmrichesjr did, and came up with the same results, except I just did it through a Family Search Missionary, and he did the contacting with the 'powers that be', and all was corrected, even to the extent that the dates of the 'modern' work were deleted from their information, and the correct dates for Baptism etc. were 'inserted', as well as the BIC notation. Good work guys in SLC.

I am serving in the Family Search library in Pocatello, Idaho. I looked at a deceased uncle's FS page and it does not have baptism or confirmation dates, though we know he was baptized. He went into the service after high school graduation, moving around the world for 20 years. Not active in church for decades. I imagine his church records are in the lost records department. Someone here at the FS library told me to look at my uncle's ID number and said if it did not start with a KW then the Church does not know my uncle is dead. Sure enough, his ID number starts with an LK. The other deceased members of his family have numbers that start with KW. So I will call the Membership Department and find out what information they need to resurrect his record so they can then kill him off and we can then move forward with his temple work.

George

For the situation with the deceased uncle whose membership record needs to be found and updated, before and/or after the membership record is found and marked as deceased, you may need to search on FamilySearch for duplicate records and combine the records you can now see with the (new-found) records with his membership information.

hohgeorge wrote: Someone here at the FS library told me to look at my uncle's ID number and said if it did not start with a KW then the Church does not know my uncle is dead. Sure enough, his ID number starts with an LK. The other deceased members of his family have numbers that start with KW.

That theory about the first characters of a person's ID is entirely incorrect. ID numbers are simply issued sequentially (they are actually numbers behind the scenes and then are converted to a more compact form consisting of letters and numbers by an algorithm). ID numbers that start with a KW were issued earlier, and IDs that start with LK were issued later. That's all you can assume. There can be person IDs that start with KW that are deceased or living, and IDs that start with LK that are deceased or living, just as with any other ID number.

hohgeorge wrote: I looked at a deceased uncle's FS page and it does not have baptism or confirmation dates, though we know he was baptized. He went into the service after high school graduation, moving around the world for 20 years. Not active in church for decades.

There are many reasons why a person's page in Family Tree might not have baptism or confirmation dates, even if that person was baptized. The first thing to be aware of is that a person may have multiple records, each with their own ID number. Remember that Family Tree is the result of millions of people making their own additions to the tree. It's entirely possible that Cousin Sydney, Aunt Agatha, and Uncle Fred all created their own copies of a record for this deceased person; none of those records could possibly contain ordinance information. When a member of the Church dies and the ward clerk records the death, then that person's membership-linked record will become public and will contain any ordinances connected to that person's membership record. But as I said before, that may not be the only record for that person in Family Tree -- you might be looking at a user-contributed record.

So before you make any other assumptions, you should search for the membership-linked record to see if it exists under a different ID in Family Tree. And don't rely on the Possible Duplicates feature on the record you are looking at (what you referred to as "a deceased uncle's FS page"). The Possible Duplicates feature depends on the accuracy of the information on that page and it has a fairly high match threshold, so it might miss a match. It's better to use the Find feature, supplying just the person's name and birth date and place that you are confident would have been on their membership record.

hohgeorge wrote:So I will call the Membership Department and find out what information they need to resurrect his record so they can then kill him off and we can then move forward with his temple work.

Of course, it's also possible that no ward clerk recorded the death and so the membership-linked record never was made public. In that case, someone will need to locate the record and record the death. That part of your plan is a good one, but should only be done after you've done the Family Tree research I recommended above.