Permission for temple work
I would like to do the work for my aunt and her husband is still alive. He is 95 and hard of hearing and lives in Germany. I have asked my cousin to ask her father for permission. They are all of catholic faith. He agreed, but now as I need his email address (he does not have an account) and phone number as well as his address my cousin was not happy with all this. She was concerned about data protection, and thought this was going too far. I thought it would be easier to go for the verbal agreement option, but now I am not sure they are ok with all this and they might change their minds. My cousin suggested to use her phone number as he will not be able to hear on the phone. Also, I am not sure she will be able to give me her email address for this purpose. Would it be sufficient to give her phone number only on the permission form, and she would answer a phone call related to the permission? Will she actually be called to confirm this? Need some advice here, please. Thank you.
Best Answer
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Hi, Beate, thank you for your concern and efforts to provide the saving ordinances for your aunt. Permission to provide these ordinances can be granted by a spouse, child or sibling of the deceased. If the cousin who you are working with is the child of the aunt, she can be listed as the Grantor on the form and a phone number is sufficient for contact information. This phrase in https://www.familysearch.org/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-request-ordinances-for-an-ancestor-who-was-born-in-the-last-110-years "To request permission, you need an email account and a phone number." applies to you not the Grantor.
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Answers
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As a Catholic myself, I recommend treading very carefully with this issue. The Catholic church has a policy that says none of their records should be on FamilySearch or made available to Latter Day Saints. Fortunately this policy is rarely enforced, and all genealogists of all religions with Catholic relatives should be very grateful for that. But it only takes a few reports of ordinances being done on Catholics in suspicious situations (and remember that many non-Latter Day Saints misunderstand what ordinances for the dead are) being made to Bishops and other leaders in the Catholic Church for the Church to clamp down and take all their records off FamilySearch and make their records accessible in person only to those who can show a Catholic baptism certificate. That would be disastrous for genealogists, whether Catholic, Latter Day Saint or another faith.
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