Bring Back Member ID account retrieval
I help in the FHC with youth quite a bit. Here in January, we'll have a new batch of 11year olds come in, and their FamilySearch account is going to be one of the first accounts they've needed to create. They are GOING to forget their login and password. They *always* do. Every year. Some of them take 2-3 years to get good at managing this information. They don't have phones. Emails at this age either belong to the school, or are notoriously unstable: they're no good for retrieving accounts.
In the past, I'd hand them a sticky note and a pen, "Go ask a member of the Bishopric for your Member Number." The leaders knew exactly what to do --we'd get the kids logged in and successful in just a few minutes. No problem. But, since the recent update, no more. Now these kids have just been locked out, and we haven't been able to help them. Instead of a positive experience, they're locked out, watching others success, but they can't even get in site. It's not a good experience --at all.
This week, I happened to have a missionary with this problem: he'd had an account when he was very young, lost the log in, and was just DOING WITHOUT the temple portions of FamilySearch because there isn't a way to retrieve these accounts. I spent *forty five minutes* on the phone with a nice FamilySearch missionary in SLC, who had to speak with a supervisor in order to get it straightened out. I have several youth in my ward that need to have the same process done, and when I was talking to my mother today, she was excited to know how to solve this issue: she has people locked out, too.
Is retrieving lost accounts really the best use of the help desk in Salt Lake City? You're looking at hours and hours of calls as word spreads that this is how you solve a previously simple issue. Certainly it's much easier for me to help the youth to have positive, successful experiences in the family history center when I can get them logged in!
Please. Bring back retrieval of accounts by Member ID number.
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Instead of trying to recover the FamilySearch account with the membership number, it's much more straightforward to sign in to FamilySearch with Church Account. If you need to recover that password, then that is pretty easy (and can be done with the membership number). When you sign in to FamilySearch with your Church Account, you can be certain that you'll have access to all the member-related features.
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Not straightforward with Church account since every membership record is linked to church account then the matter of password since in first place these youths have the Church account themselves and still got locked out. Has to be 13 years old to be able to use themselves without parental permission.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please
Not straightforward with Church account since every membership record is linked to church account...
That linkage is precisely why using Church Account to sign in to FamilySearch is so helpful in these situations.
...then the matter of password since in first place these youths have the Church account themselves and still got locked out.
I don't see anything in the original post that says that the youths had attempted to sign in with Church Account and got locked out. The only mention was attempting to sign in with their FamilySearch account.
Has to be 13 years old to be able to use themselves without parental permission.
It is indeed true that to establish an account (Church Account or FamilySearch account), children under 13 need parental approval. But my comment was only about account recovery, not about creating accounts.
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Account recovery, unfortunately requires most of time using the mobiles (aka smartphones).
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