Membership Record Number Bypass Feature-FS

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Anyone who has tried to help a member of the church create a Family Search account has probably encountered the issue of the patron not having their Membership Record Number (MRN) or their email address with them to activate their newly created account. 

Rectifying this can be very time consuming and often counter productive to what should be a simple process.  This can be discouraging to the patron coming into the library to get started on Family Tree.  Creating a desire in them to return and learn more about their family is often dependent on a good first experience when seeing their family on the tree for the first time.

Family Search developers were aware of this and created a solution that will eliminate the hassle of not having your MRN with you at the initial visit to the site to create an account while in the library or at home. 

This new feature allows the member to temporarily bypass the MRN addition to the form.  So then they essentially create a public account.  When you come to the place on the form where you Select “yes” When asked if you are a member of the church, a  box will appear where you would enter your MRN, a box appears that says”

 "Don't know your MRN?  Remind me later." 

By selecting this option the patron can complete their registration in order to enter the Family Tree.  FS will then activate their account through their e-mail right away and they are ready to begin to learn Family Tree.  

After contacting FS it was learned they are still working on the reminder to the member.  That feature should be up and running soon.  

It is important that we tell members at that point that they will need to go into the settings and add their MRN later in order for them to see any ordinances work in the future.  This is something that would have to be done anyway if they come to the Library without the MRN.  But this new feature allows them to have a better quality initial experience when they have a desire to use FT and to take away some hands on experience. This would be done with someone qualified to help them standing by.

This has proven to be a really good addition to the program and we saw evidence of this last week when a large group of youth arrived in our library with no MRNs.  

At the end of the class period that morning the youth heard the admonition for them to get involved in Family History by Elder Bednar.  He told them that their fingers had been trained for this work with their texting and tweeting. 

By using this new bypass feature many of them got into the program quickly and went to town.  Their trained fingers in addition to their quick minds and computer skills created quite a buzz of clicking keyboards in the library. 

The young people not only got a quick start but they were very intuitive about the program. Many needed little or no program instruction at all once they explored it for about 10 minutes.  After a little practice as I walked up and down the bank of computer on that row and asked if they needed any help they were all fine and did not even have many questions.  Elder Bednar was totally right.  They were amazing.

The upside to this MRN bypass feature is they will initially have all the same privileges as any person signing on for a public FS account. Either way they are going to have to go through the following process to access their LDS account.  

To add the MRN they simply go to the drop down menu under their name on the home page.  

Select Settings >Account> Click the bullet that asks if you are a member of the church>Enter MRN>Save Changes.  That will complete the conversion to an LDS account.

They should be given information about the Help Section of Family Search program or the 1-866-406-1830 number for help.