International move

Suppose I were to move to Amsterdam in the very near future. I know records can be transferred between units within seconds in the US, but would my records have to go from my current ward to HQ, and then from HQ to the area office there, and then from there to my Dutch unit?

How do international moves work?

crookms wrote:Suppose I were to move to Amsterdam in the very near future. I know records can be transferred between units within seconds in the US, but would my records have to go from my current ward to HQ, and then from HQ to the area office there, and then from there to my Dutch unit?

I know we (a ward in the US) have requested records that were previously in a ward in Japan, and they came quickly. I don't know what happened behind the scenes to make that happen, but CHQ knows about all membership records, so I doubt that the lengthy process you described would have to happen for the reverse process. A copy of the record may perhaps go to some database in the area office -- that used to happen, but I don't know if that happens anymore.

I moved to Germany for a summer, and it took (according to the ward clerk) two months for my records to get there. It is my understanding that part of the process is that your actual record does not leave the region. However, it must be translated and then the translated copy is sent to the regional office where you will be moving, and that is sent down to the ward.

I know as a former university ward clerk here in the US, I've been able to request records from all over the world and the longest I've had to wait is 2 weeks. Perhaps the difference in timing coming to the US vs leaving the US is the size of the staff in the office?

Here in the UK I have requested records many times from overseas units, including Portugal and France. These are, of course, not English speaking nations. The records on average took no more than a couple of hours to arrive, via MLS.

The more information you can give the Ward Clerk, full name, ideally your MRN, date of birth, old ward/branch and new address, contact details etc.. Speeds up the process considerably.

MLS itself provides the default language of the country your in. As an assistant branch clerk, in France for a while, I again requested records from English speaking countries without any problems.

It will depend on the area covered by your local office. France and Portugal are covered by the office that deals with the UK and there shouldn't be much of an issue. The transfer of records between areas can be more problematic, particularly for places like Africa which don't have the facilities we enjoy.

I believe crislapi is correct in that the numbers of people in the office will have a large effect on when records get through.

crislapi wrote:However, it must be translated and then the translated copy is sent to the regional office where you will be moving, and that is sent down to the ward.

I had to think about what had to be translated. The template already exists in all languages. The data is names, dates, and places. Much of which should be able to be done by machine. However, depending on the language, the translation of the name to the local character set might be an issue. So the time it takes may depend on what languages it's moving between.

But I'd think most changes within Western countries (USA/Europe) would be straightforward.

RussellHltn wrote:However, depending on the language, the translation of the name to the local character set might be an issue.

I believe that now this is handled by machine too.