Strange Membership Transfer

I am the Stake Clerk in my Stake and have a strange situation that was brought to my attention today. There is a family in our Stake who have lived here for many years. Their records have been in the Stake for all of those years. Four of their children have grown up and their records have been transferred out of the Ward the parents live in, but one child still lives at home. Many years ago they lived in Japan with their 4 oldest children. Suddenly this week duplicate membership records were transferred into their ward for the mother and 3 of the children with the mother being listed as the head of household. The effect of this has been to separate the father's record from he rest of the family with the youngest child and show the mother as head of household with the three children in her household that don't even live with them any more. Also, the three children's records that came from Japan with their mother's duplilcate record now show up twice. Can anybody help unravel this?

Check the membership numbers. See if they are the same. I'm guessing they are not. I think it may be related to how membership records are processed by area offices.

Assuming these have different membership numbers, you can fix it in MLS. From the toolbar, Membership > Records > Cancel Record. Follow the screen prompts from there. One of the reasons for doing this is to cancel duplicates.

Before you cancel the other set of records,
see if they fill in any missing info like place of
birth or ordinance dates. The duplicates might
help complete the records you have.

- Atticus

Thank you both for your input. Russell, the membership record numbers are exactly the same. The biggest concern I have right now is that most of the children in this family are adults whose records were no longer in the ward they have now been transferred to and I don't know if this action might have pulled them from the wards they should be in or not, since those units are outside our Stake boundaries. I want to be careful in proceeding so we don't create issues for those adult children and their records. Linking the parents back up will be simple, but removing the duplicate records could create more problems. Atticus, thanks for your advice. I will go through each record with the ward membership clerk and make sure we keep the most complete record on each family member.

kimballball wrote: The biggest concern I have right now is that most of the children in this family are adults whose records were no longer in the ward they have now been transferred to and I don't know if this action might have pulled them from the wards they should be in or not, since those units are outside our Stake boundaries. I want to be careful in proceeding so we don't create issues for those adult children and their records.

Now that you have their records you can see the previous unit and you could contact the Clerk in their stake/ward to see if the records have moved out.

kimballball wrote:The biggest concern I have right now is that most of the children in this family are adults whose records were no longer in the ward they have now been transferred to and I don't know if this action might have pulled them from the wards they should be in or not, since those units are outside our Stake boundaries.

In that case I'd contact Local Unit Support. They may be able to back out the changes, or advise how to proceed without messing things up. What happened should also be brought to someone's attention as it may signify a bigger problem somewhere.

kimballball wrote:. . . the membership record numbers are exactly the same.

If you have two membership records in your ward with the same membership record number, it sounds to me as if you have a database problem in MLS and need to contact the help desk.