32 thoughts on “There Shall Be a Record — or Two, or Three — Kept Among You”

1. This is fascinating. No wonder legible handwriting was so important (thinking of Heber J. Grant practicing his penmanship).

2. Ardis, somewhat related to this, do you have any history of the membership number that everyone has? I wonder when it was created, by who and what do the groups of numbers and letters separated by dashes represent? Why not just a sequential number?

3. Regarding baby blessings, do you have any sense whether they created membership or other records for the non-mormon babies that were commonly blessed at the turn of the century? I know they kept statistics–the actual number performed, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything else.

4. I forgot to add, this list pales in complexity to the current instructions for creating ward and stake histories. When I first encountered them a few years ago I felt like I had been redirected to IRS instructions for doing your federal taxes.

5. KLC, I don’t have any ideas about that number. It seems to be something like credit card numbers, or account numbers for utilities or consumer sites: You’d think it would take fewer characters if they did just assign sequential numbers. Perhaps — pure speculation — one or more of the characters works as a “check digit” or some such thing, to verify that the whole number fits whatever algorithm was used to create it.

   I haven’t seen those instructions for histories, KLC, but I can well imagine they are doozies! We’re rilly, rilly good at minutiae, and expecting (probably in vain) everyone to comply.

6. Ardis, I’ll get in line behind J. Stapley. I seem to recall my grandmother mentioning that when she served as a ward clerk (can this be correct?) in Carbon County, Utah, in the early 20th century, she was paid to do so. Have you ever read/heard anything about this kind of an arrangement? Thanks in advance.

7. J., I was a little surprised by these instructions mentioning children of members and then not going on to give instructions for children of non-members. I’ve certainly seen a LOT of non-member blessings.

   Usually, but not always, the children of members and the children of non-members were entered on separate pages in the branch/mission membership books. The information recorded for non-members — birth, parents, blessing info — is identical to that for members, except that “Children of Non-Members” or some variant was written either at the top of the page or in the “remarks” column. The only difference I’ve noticed is that the children of members often have some symbol (a +, often) in the margin, or words to the effect, indicating that a baby once blessed has now been baptized and a formal membership record created elsewhere in the book. The lists of children of non-members are just that — lists — with no sign that any followup was ever made.

   A little later in the century when they got to the standard printed membership books (the one with 5 or 6 memberships in blocks on a single page), no membership records were created for children of non-members, while membership records showing the genealogical identification and the blessing information were created for children of members. Off the top of my head, I’m not sure, once those standard membership records came into use, whether the children of non-members were listed in detail on the Form E reports, or not.

8. Gary, while I don’t think I’ve seen evidence for payment of ward clerks, I would not be at all surprised to run across it some day. Up to about the time your grandmother was probably speaking of, the clerks who assisted bishops with tithing-in-kind accounting certainly did get paid — not a lot, but some. The payments made to patriarchs by members who received blessings were not made to “purchase a blessing” but to pay the patriarch’s expenses in hiring someone with decent handwriting to write out fair copies of the blessings. In other words, once upon a time, clerking was considered a professional service that was compensated, not a calling. Hence, it wouldn’t surprise me that in some times and places ward clerks were paid for the same reason.

9. Ardis, thank you so much for that insightful response. And thanks for your response to Gary. I didn’t realize that PB payments were for those professional services. It makes sense!

10. And yes — women certainly did hold positions as ward clerks! Not the “chief” clerk who sat in on council meetings, perhaps, but definitely the clerks who handled routine correspondence (there was a lot of it — hence all that letterhead I’ve posted) and record keeping.

    As recently as the 1990s, until the new handbook of that era made priesthood a requirement, my aunt, Evelyn Taylor, was membership clerk for her Poplar Grove ward. She is the one who cleaned up generations of inaccurate and incomplete paper membership records and assisted in the issuance of correct electronic records. She told me once that she had to call an office in the COB from time to time with questions, and as the years passed the voices on the telephone became more and more skeptical when she identified herself as the Poplar Grove Whatever Number membership clerk, so women clerks must have become so rare by those days that some of the COB personnel were unaware they existed. But then came the new handbook, and her bishop was forced to release her.

11. I’m curious what these “genealogy sheets” involved. I can’t imagine it would be practical to record much more than a person’s parents and children (if any) in a handwritten membership record. Especially since it’s part of the baptism record, it’s hard to imagine new members being required to research a 4-generation tree before joining.

    (I recall there were more stringent genealogy requirements at some point in places like Brazil and South Africa, but I’m guessing that Columbus, Ohio in the ’30s wasn’t using genealogy for the purposes of proving non-African descent.)

12. Ah, I should have explained that — I don’t have an illustration handy, but I will snap one next time I’m at CHL.

    These “genealogy sheets,” with some variation as EVERYthing had variations — were just slips of paper, cut perhaps six to a standard page, with basic identifying information: Name, parents’ names, birth date and place, spaces to record whatever was the cause of creating or modifying a record: date and officiator at a baptism, confirmation, or ordination, for example. These little slips accompanied everything, so that the clerks at both end (branch and mission, say) knew for certain who they were talking about and could make changes to the proper record. Today’s digital membership number serves the same function.

    Somewhere along the line they’d fallen into the habit of calling that limited identifying information “genealogy,” although, as you show in your comment, Mike R., that was hardly an accurate term.

13. Ardis, your blog has honestly given me a greater respect for recordkeepers! That had to be a monumental job!
    My experience with ward membership records starts in the very early 1980’s, when I got called as a membership clerk for about six months. We would request a person’s records from church headquarters, and we would have to tell them what ward/branch the person was moving from so they could request the records from the “losing” ward/branch, and then they would send the “gaining” ward/branch a printed sheet with the person’s info, which we put in a big “ward membership” notebook. The process could take a month or more. I remember one records transfer that took three months because the “losing” ward was just plain being lazy and not sending the form.
    When my wife and I moved 18 months ago, it was simply a matter of going to the clerks office, and right there on the computer he simply typed in our new address, and through the magic of correctly-functioning computers we were “instantly” official members of the ward.
    I cannot imagine the days in which the records were kept as you’ve described in this blog! And yet it was undoubtedly the best way at the time.

14. Sarah in Georgia, somehow I missed your comment! Sorry.

    The mission records tend to be so much more legible than the branch records, and I note from the “sign in” page at the beginning of many record books that most — really, the vastest majority — of mission clerks handling membership records were women. A lot of sister missionaries had been schoolteachers and stenographers pre-mission, and most of them had excellent penmanship. Many elders did, too (when mission presidents asked Salt Lake to send them missionaries to work in the office, they sometimes specified that they wanted young men who had business school training, which included penmanship).

    When you’re searching these lists of members and ordinances — and I suppose financial data in other records — you’re grateful that they did pay so much attention to penmanship.

    And think of all those certificates (baptism, ordination) that were sent to individual members! That’s where a skill like President Grant’s calligraphy would really be appreciated, no?

15. I’m thinking of the days when the financial clerk made out tithing receipts each time and had to find the ward members to pass them out. Writing each receipt then handing it to the right person for every donation was quite a job.

16. Fascinating thread. I’m glad to see that item #10 (excommunication) doesn’t actually involve “blotting out” names. In my experience, those who leave the church continue to be checked up periodically.

    On paid clerking, Spencer W. Kimball’s biography mentions him being paid as a stake clerk (1920s era):

    “On those days, that was about a half-time job… consequently the clerk received $50 per month. At the end of the year, with the annual reports due, it burgeoned into a full-time job, consuming every evening from the time he got home from the bank until well after midnight. “The home was completely taken over by reports,” said Camilla. Part of the job included audits of the ward records of all 21 congregations in the stake.

17. This has been a tremendously enlightening thread. In the opening vignette for a chapter I wrote about a missionary travelling to SLC to be ordained a seventy and start a mission: “Once in Salt Lake City, like all new missionaries, he presented himself at the Historian’s Office to deliver his genealogy.” The bit about his “genealogy” was from his diary, but I hadn’t realized that this was a “thing.”

18. Carol, since we both remember that familiar tithing receipt process, we know it wasn’t all that long ago. So much has changed so fast!

    Thanks for that, TOClark. That’s relevant and colorful and fun because of who it comes from. I’ve seen lots of membership records with indications of excommunications, but they’ve always been a single line drawn through information, or an “X” across an entire record, with “cut off” or “excommunicated” and sometimes a date written somewhere near. Information has always remained legible. I suppose there were exceptions somewhere, as there always seem to be exceptions, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a literal “blotting out.”

    Jonathan, you can just see in your mind’s eye, can’t you, the clerks in the Historian’s Office taking those “genealogy” slips and using them as they filled out the line in the Record of Missionaries that included birthdate and parents’ names!

    Even after all these years, I’m terrible at predicting what posts will catch readers’ imaginations. I thought we might get some reminiscences of ward clerks as comments here, but never dreamed the direction that these great questions would take us.

19. Ardis, yes it is very much like a credit card number, which makes me wonder if it was instituted in the post WWII era of church corporatization or did it appear in the late 60s or early 70s with the beginnings of computerized record keeping? Was there any kind of a membership number that preceded the one we have now or did they just go by member names before then? Thanks so much for your continued emphasis on church history beyond the grand themes and players that we are all so familiar with.

20. After one family move, my kids’ records flew back and forth across the country several times in an afternoon. The clerk of the new ward was trying to collect our whole family, but the two oldest children were in college, and their ward clerks saw their membership records disappear and recalled them. This happened two or three times before we got a phone call to straighten it out.

21. KLC, I’ve looked up my own membership records, so far as they were publicly visible (they aren’t, past about 1970). The records on the ward and stake level were still being typed on ledger pages at that point, with no sign of any membership number beyond the membership number of the local record (the first record was always 1 — that is, every ward had a record numbered 1; that number wasn’t unique to the person). I suspect there was probably some way to number records within the PBO filing system, too, but if so, I’ve seen no sign that such PBO numbers accompanied memberships when they were called in from one ward and transferred to another.

    I haven’t seen membership records from the ’70s and ’80s or later (the Church has some vigorous privacy concerns). I really have no firm notion of when they did start using numbers that stayed with the record itself as it was transferred. But since there’s no sign of that in the ’50s and ’60s, my guess is that it is purely an innovation of the digital age, and that the first permanent member numbers came in the ’90s when we all got our first awareness of those numbers.

    LauraN, ease of transferring electronic records comes with its own new set of ways to mangle a system, does it? I’m not surprised!

22. TOClark, that reminds me of the story about SWK in Elder Packer’s “Unwritten order of things” talk, where Kimball, who was a counselor in a stake presidency and had taken over the responsibilities of a stake clerk who moved, was told to choose between the two. He chose to be the stake clerk because he had a typewriter and he knew the system, but he was later shamed for it by someone who assumed he just wanted the stipend.

    I suppose a member of the stake presidency saying, “you know, a counselor is easier to replace and train than a clerk” is further illustration of the complexity and value of clerical work.

23. The digital age has it’s own problems. I was a ward clerk back when the system was DOS-based. The system had some sanity checks built in and complained to me that Sister so-and-so’s endowment date couldn’t be right, because Oct 31, 19xx was a Sunday. It wanted the right date, so I asked her, and she said, “Yeah, it was Saturday, the day before Halloween, but the temple entered the date wrong. No one’s been able to fix it before.”

    Well, I couldn’t either. There was a place to change the date, but it wouldn’t accept the change. Apparently you needed all kinds of evidence to change the date that the temple put in, even when the temple’s date was clearly wrong and the member had a clear memory of when it really happened. I wasn’t going to make her chase down witness statements to correct someone else’s error.

24. Once you’ve finished scaring us all about the complexity of membership records, you can move on to financial records! (But, speaking of membership records, I remember when my dad was bishop of a BYU student ward in the 1960s, the ward got a non-white–yellow, or pink, perhaps–copy of the records for each of the members of the ward, while their “real” records stayed at their home ward.)

    Ward financial reports were written in a large (12″ x 20″, perhaps) report book, with extra carbon copies for the ward, the stake and who knows who else. Total contributions per week were recorded in each of the categories (tithing, fast offering, budget, welfare, etc., etc.) and expenditures were also recorded, charged to the appropriate accounts. My hunch is that all were entered twice, in a “total” column and then in the appropriate category.

    And then it all had to be added up, or subtracted, and the totals compared to the balance in the bank account. Which is where the fun really began.

    December 1984 was the month that I learned that our ward hadn’t submitted a financial report for 11 months. On top of that, there was tithing settlement to be done. And our fourth child was born on the 17th. And I actually had to go to work for my employer. But the stake president, an accountant, saved my life. We spent several late nights in the office at the church trying to make sense of the mess, and he accomplished miracles in spotting the reasons why stuff didn’t add up. Without him, I suspect that I’d still be trying to straighten it all up.

    Now, with all those financial records created by the computers in SLC, and the members making contributions online, all the work has gone out of clerking!

25. Ha ha! I suspect there are still some ward clerks and some accountant-types at the Salt Lake end who could still tell horror stories!

    Did you even acknowledge the existence of Christmas in 1984?

26. It turns out that our poor clerk had been undone by some bounced donor checks. Not only was he supposed to reverse the credits to each of the accounts the donor had tried to contribute to, but he also had to enter and charge against the ward budget account the bank charges for the NSF checks. And if funds had already been forwarded to church headquarters–tithing, for example–that had to be unwound somehow. And all that was just too complicated for him!

    And then there were the records of individual contributions! By the early-1980s the ward prepared a typewritten form, using a typewriter with a special font that the optical scanners at church headquarters were trained to read. So every week our handwritten spreadsheet–usually a pad of lined paper with vertical lines hand drawn to separate the different funds (tithing, F.O., budget, etc)–was typed by a “ward secretary” onto the special forms supplied by the church, and then those were mailed, with a check in the amount of funds being transferred, to church headquarters.

    And every Sunday after church when the contributions were accounted for, those handwritten spreadsheets were added and checked and cross-checked, all using an adding machine which kindly printed all entries on a paper tape so you could check to see if you’d erred in entering any of the numbers.

27. Christmas 1984? I don’t remember.

28. In my daily work I have had opportunity to see lots and lots of MRNs. My guess is that they were issued sometime between 1971 and 1980, and that it was a big mostly simultaneous task for all units, as families that I’m guessing were living together in that time period seem to have almost-but-not-quite sequential numbers. There also seems to be some degree of consecutivity, but on a macro scale, as young people born in the same year have some similarities in numbering.

29. My father was a branch clerk in New Mexico in the mid-1960s. I was only about six at the time, so I don’t remember much about it, but I remember that my parents’ book of remembrance had some old membership records for our family stuck between the pages. I had the impression that Dad had prepared new records, perhaps to clean up previous errors and corrections and start agin with a clean record. But now that I think about it, it is also possible that the church had issued new forms, or a new procedure. It’s been years since I’ve seen the records, though I assume my mother still has them. I remember mostly typewritten information, with some handwritten notations. I think the current address was supposed to be written in pencil so it could be erased and corrected when the person moved. The pages were maybe 5×8 inches with multiple perforations on the left side, so they could be put in a multi-ring binder. I don’t know, but I’m thinking the binder was taller than the forms, so the records could be put in the binder overlapping, with the names visible at the top of the form, to allow the clerk to see all the names at once, and still turn immediately to the desired record.

    Regarding Mark B’s comment, I remember my ward in the early ’70s had a ward directory in which members who were away at college, and probably the military also, had a “pink out” notation. It seemed weird and cryptic, though I could tell that it referred to members away to school. “Pink out” almost sounds like being blotted out with a pink marker. Or maybe that you’ve been attacked by the Pink Panther or something. (Ta-dum. Ta-dum. Ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-duuuuuummmm…) But I think someone explained that “pink out” meant that the pink copy of the membership record had been sent to the student’s ward or branch at school, while the main record remained in the home ward.

    Indeed electronic records have their own challenges. Last year, my son was ordained an elder, and then went off to college. I was anxious for the whole process to move forward, since the ordination had to be recorded before the records could be sent, and I wanted the records sent to his new ward promptly so he didn’t fall between the cracks. Nobody else seemed to share my sense of urgency. Once he was properly interviewed, the ordination had to be approved by the high council at their next meeting. Then we had to wait for a time when a high councilman could come to oversee the ordination. By that time, my son had already started college, so then we had to find a time when he could retrun for the ordination, and when the high councilman was also available. There are only certain people in the stake who have the access to record a MP ordination. Those people also didn’t share my sense of urgency, and puttered around for a couple of weeks, which delayed being able to transfer the record. Meanwhile, my son had encountered the missionaries on campus who got his information and forwarded it to their ward clerk. This was unnecessary, since I had intended to have the record sent as soon as the ordination was recorded. Fortunately, the new ward clerk didn’t find the matter particularly urgent either, so he delayed for a week or two while our stake people were delaying making a record of the ordination. The stake clerk eventually, with some prodding, logged on to enter the ordination. Literally at the moment he was in the process of filling in the required blanks, the new ward’s clerk finally requested the record. When the stake clerk hit submit, he was informed by the computer that the process couldn’t be completed because the record was no longer in the ward. The clerks eventually got in touch with each other and had to decide whether to send the record back temporarily, or have the new stake record the ordination. In the process, I’m sure there was no certificate issued because even if the new stake could have printed a certificate with the old ward and stake’s name, they wouldn’t have access to get the correct signatures. At this point, it was all out of my hands, and I can only assume it was all somehow taken care of.

30. I am curious about the impact of GDPR on church record keeping in Europe. I suppose getting permission to keep information about faithful members won’t be too tough, but the disaffected might have something to say about it.

31. When I was about 12, missionaries showed up at my house to convert me because I was unbaptized according to the ward books. My family was baptized and I was active, but the missionaries noticed and came looking for me. I told them the date and who baptized me and the whole story. For a few weeks I was told I may have to be baptized again. But then someone found a penciled record in the margins of a book somewhere so I became official.

32. During law school, I got permission from Leonard Arrington to read the transcripts of the Salt Lake High Council up to 1890 for a research paper on how Church courts were used in territorial Utah to litigate legal disputes between members. The High Council records were verbatim transcripts. A stake clerk had taken down everything that was said during the testimony of witnesses and the discussion by the stake presidency and high council, using a form of shorthand, and then had written it out in longhand in big ledger books. I am pretty sure that these clerks were being paid for an essential and time-consuming service. As far as I could tell, almost every page I read was being read for the first time since it was written down. The plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses were identified by name, but that was about it. I don’t recall seeing anyone’s mailing address recorded. In a few cases, people were excommunicated for refusing to comply with the High Council’s ruling, such as by bringing a lawsuit in the territorial civil court against the other member. I don’t recall any special notation when an excommunication was recorded in the proceedings.

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