Move out / unknown address TIP

I've had some success with this but not always.

If you have records for someone that you can't locate (missionaries or H/V teachers visited and reported that the person is not at the address on the record). Try this

Go to their record in LCR and click on "family" and check to see if either of the parents or any married child is a member, their record number would show as a link.

Click on the link and and get email for their Bishop.

Email the Bishop, tell them who you're looking for, who their parent is and ask them to see if someone can make contact with the parent to learn of child's address.

This does not always work but it's worth a shot

This is a great tip. Our assistant Membership clerk uses it often and it has proven very successful.

Great tip, but I'd modify the suggestion to contact the ward clerk of the parent's ward. Bishops have a lot to worry about. It's a bit more work to go to CDOL to look it up but I've rarely had a fellow clerk fail to follow up with me. They have a vested interest as well.

True and I guess you could research that by taking extra steps using CDOL but simply clicking the link for the parent in LCR only gives you the ward name and Bishop email.

Yes, that link is too easy sometimes. It's obviously for bishops themselves to facilitate communication. Perhaps the site can be 'enhanced' that for bishops it shows the name of other bishops but for clerks it would show the name of the other clerk.

I currently serve as ward clerk in my ward. If someone outside our stake contacted me looking for contact information of a member of my ward, I would run it by the bishop anyway. There is a reason the church does not make such contact information available to ward leaders worldwide.

It is easy enough for the bishop to forward the e-mail to his ward clerk and tell him to "take care of it." When I served as bishop, I wouldn't have considered it a burden for the occasional request.

I agree however the church does make leadership contact information available worldwide, for those in clerk or other leadership positions. The bishops information is available by clicking the link in LCR and complete leadership information for all units is available in CDOL.

I'm pretty sure that CHQ will check with the parents if the record is moved to "Address Unknown". Since there's no way to indicate that you've contacted the parents, then it's likely they'll be contacted twice.

Personally, I think the instruction to check with known family members is referring to people within the ward and not necessarily tracking down family in other wards. If that's the case, I do wish the instructions were clarified.

I personally believe HQ wants us do do all we can before sending the record back without an address.

Our ward has a high percent of rental housing with transient members who move frequently. We are buried in members moving in who often are not living at the address given, just because it is the last known address on public records. In our ward 70% of members are less active and do not attend church. The remaining 30% have a hard time keeping up with all the service needed that includes keeping in touch with the 70% and finding out when and to where they moved. After we have done all we can on the nine steps, we may have found some general clues to where they moved, but we cannot even add any comments to records move out to Address Unknown to help the volunteers at CHQ in finding their current address.

Volunteers at CHQ have access to the records of all parents and siblings and children regardless of in which church unit they current reside. We clerks in the wards have more hurdles to clear just to reach parents as has been discussed above. We understand they have a shortage of volunteers at CHQ to keep up with the volume of less actives in Address Unknown. That is why they began a program of sending 20 records back each quarter to the wards that sent them to Address Unknown a year earlier.

That practice of each quarter sending 20 records of lost members back to wards making them appear as normal members moving back in was overwhelming to our workload that we could not keep up with even before the old records began coming back to us when we had even less information available as we did when first sending them to Address Unknown. That began a practice of many wards like ours subscribing to people search programs to find any address to avoid sending records to Address Unknown only to get them back again to bury us. Now, we have no confidence that members moved in are really there. Often, we are getting records from other wards only because the address in our ward was the last known address before we performed the nine steps and moved them out to Address Unknown or the most current address we could find.

We need a comment box when moving records out to add any clues we have obtained to help volunteers at CHQ, and we need more volunteers at CHQ. We also need a "Personal Progress Guide to Blessings and Eternal Life" to help new converts work out their own salvation and remain active during their first years because the present methods are not retaining enough new converts. We are wearing down the 30% of active members attending sacrament meetings due to all the effort required by the 70% who have fallen off the path and chosen the large and spacious building. Time for changes to retain more converts and less actives in activity.

llcampbell wrote:Our ward has a high percent of rental housing with transient members who move frequently. We are buried in members moving in who often are not living at the address given, just because it is the last known address on public records. In our ward 70% of members are less active and do not attend church. The remaining 30% have a hard time keeping up with all the service needed that includes keeping in touch with the 70% and finding out when and to where they moved.

I'd suggest working though the stake president to talk to the area authority to alert them to the situation. Either that or writing to CHQ to alert them to the impact of the current system on the ward.

I'd also keep a log of all members moved out after the 9 step research. If you find any coming back to the same address, I'd take appropriate action.

Records should not come back to the same address if you delete the address before sending them back. A perfectly legitimate practice as long as you have verified that the address is incorrect.