Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
I have a couple of adults in my Pack who have 2 accounts each. One has 3 children in my unit and at one time I had three accounts for him. My local Scout office got rid of one of them when I asked but did not finish. Another person came as a parent at the beginning of the school year and then switched into a den leader roll about 2 months later. That person got another account with the switch to den leader. His wife also turned in paperwork to be a leader at that same time and has never shown up as a leader in the system. I kind of wonder if the wife’s application got turned into the second account for the husband?
We have found that if you put it in Scoutbook and it’s already on my.scouting.org Internet advancement, it will create 2 different people. I Contacted council and let the council handle this issue to make sure the right one was deleted. I hope this is helpful and not an issue… This is just how I handled it.
Please provide all of the BSA Member IDs (MIDs) you have for these individuals. Because the first one has a common name, we cannot easily find them all.
So, do you want the BSA member IDs’ along with the scoutbook user id’s still? I got two replies from two people where one reply says nothing can be done for one ID while the other is fixed and the other reply asks for more information. Do you want more information on the ID that you can’t do anything for?
You need to ask your local council to merge the BSA member numbers, so that the registrations are on a single BSA number. After that happens, we can merge the Scoutbook accounts. We can’t do it before, because we don’t know which BSA number will be kept.
You will also need to ask your council to merge the BSA member numbers, so that the Lion and Tiger Adult Partner registrations are on the same BSA number.
@BenjaminReish With regard to their training, ask each person to log in at my.scouting and use Manage Member ID. They will want to set one of their BSA member numbers as “primary”, wait for 24 hours, then set the next one as “primary”. Repeat as needed.
Now or next week after some of these changes are complete?
What does logging into my.scouting and setting different BSA member ID’s as Primary do?
And, side note, I am still wondering why none of this mess happened to me personally. I have 2 kids in scouts and did not end up with multiple IDs in either scoutbook or my.scouting. Did someone most likely go through all this hassle for me without telling me?
@BenjaminReish The training is associated with BSA member numbers – not Scoutbook userID numbers. Users can use Manage Member ID at my.scouting to add multiple BSA member numbers and combine their training. I was able to combine their training, so they no longer need to do that.
However, this will not merge their Lion and Tiger Adult Partner registrations – this has to be done by councils.
One of the most common causes of multiple BSA IDs is moving between councils. The next most common is mismatches between names and other identifying information on applications submitted to council (e.g. using a nickname instead of legal name for the scout or parent). It also occurs is when the registrar doesn’t check for the existing account and just creates a new one. Scoutbook accounts suffer from the same failure modes.
If someone, for example, lists their name as “Jan Smith” on their scout’s youth application, then the registrar creates a parent account for “Jan Smith”. Then, when Jan applies to be a scouter, she puts down her legal name “Janet Smith”. So, the registrar creates a new scouter account for “Janet Smith” not knowing that “Jan Smith” the existing parent is also “Janet Smith” the new scouter. The same sort of thing can happen when registering a second scout, particularly if the other identifying information (e.g. address and/or email) has changed in between applications. We actually had the name discrepancy issue arise for one of our parents, and it was an enormous headache to diagnose and resolve at the time.
