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Research Planning
FAQs about the I.G.I. - The Answers

The short answer to your query is, no!  The two events do not necessarily have to occur simultaneously or in sequence, such as the entering of a member's PIN number and the obtaining of data.

If the name and address of a submitter was obtained it was likely taken from either the Ancestral File or the Pedigree Resource File.  Any member of the public can view this same information without the necessity of being a member of the Church or having to enter a special PIN or identity number.  If the name and address of the submitter was obtained from either of these two sources after a member entered his or her PIN number, then I would have to conjecture that the member did not fully understand the working mechanisms of the familysearch.org website and was labouring under the impression that they had to enter their identity in order to access the information.

What the Church members do have access to that is different from the general public is the ordinance index.  From the ordinance index one can obtain the name of the temple at which an ordinance was performed for an IGI submission and the date on which the ordinance was performed.  He or she might also be able, in some rare instances, to access the name of the proxy or heir that attended at the temple to perform the ordinances.  Just be aware that proxies and heirs may or may not have any consanguineous relationship to the subject of the IGI entry.

In very rare instances, where there is a Family History Centre tied to a local temple and the Church member was a temple-recommend holder, he or she may have been able to access the original data that was submitted to the temple on disk.  This, though, I would think would constitute a breach of the privacy that Salt Lake wishes to maintain on behalf of submitters post-1991.  Otherwise, I'm afraid that there is no 'magic' formula for accessing a submitter's information through a Church member.