Core Docs - Supporting Rock - Update Data for Common Life Events

Rock Version: v19.0
Last Modified: 2025-11-06 10:51 AM

Below are some suggested processes for common life events. While these are just suggestions, you’ll want to have documented processes for each of these events so your staff handles them consistently.

Coming Soon!
In an upcoming update to Rock, you'll be able to automate some of these processes. Keep your eye on Rock’s workflow features as they are released.

Death of a Family Member

The death of a loved one is a very hard thing. It’s made even harder, though, when the remaining person is constantly reminded of their loss. When someone notifies your organization about a death, we suggest taking the following steps:

For optimal data management, we recommend removing deceased individuals from their original families in all scenarios. While this may have minor impacts on certain features, the overall benefits outweigh these considerations.

Divorce

Before making these changes, be sure to discreetly get as much information about the family situation as you can. This will ensure you get the information right and not create an awkward situation in the future.

Marriage

After the wedding, you'll want to complete the following steps.

Child Turns 18

When a child reaches adulthood it’s a good idea to move them to a new family, even if they are still living in their parents’ home.

You can use the notes to document the reasons for the changes. While it may seem obvious now, it won’t in a couple of weeks, especially for the next person who views the records.

Process Adult Children Job
Rock ships with a job that updates children to adults automatically, which not only makes things easier for you but also helps keep the person data in Rock accurate. The job only processes people who have a child role in one or more families, but also is of an "adult" age. The default adult age in Rock is 18, but you can change this. There are several settings the job uses to process individuals, which you can manage by navigating to Tools > Data Integrity > Data Automation | Move Adult Children. With these settings, the job looks at all the families a person belongs to and their role in each of those families, then decides whether or not the person should be updated as an adult and/or added to a new family.
 
You can learn more about jobs and how to configure them in the Jobs section of the Rock Fundamentals guide.