Need help updating my deceased sister's record and family tree
My younger sister died in September 2021; she was a volunteer at a Family History Center for many years. I have 2 issues in trying to accomplish her final wishes:
- I have access to her account (this one) and I was not able to mark her deceased according to the message I received when I tried to do that. I created a twin sister with the same name and birth date who died in Sep 2021, though that seems not to be the best way to do it. That also meant that I had to marry her twin to her deceased husband.
It would not let me mark her deceased from her own account and because she was showing a living, that record cannot be accessed by anyone else from a different account - my own or another friend who uses FamilySearch regularly
- Our mother, who died 10 years ago, is showing twice - once as a private person on my sister's account and once as a public person that others can see. From her account, I could not merge them nor could I delete the private one as it said she did not have permission to do that even though she had created it originally it seems.
I do not use FamilySearch for my own tree so I am not very knowledgeable about how it works in this situation. I have read many help pages, however, none of them explained how to resolve these issues. Thank you for any help or guidance.
Barbara (using sister Marilyn's account)
Answers
-
If you have the username and password for your sister who has a public account at FamilySearch, and who has been a volunteer at a Family History Center, you can still sign into her account, however you can never make the person who is the Root Person who started the account deceased.
When someone dies who owns a FamilySearch account, you can provide our support team with details to request that their account be closed. Since Family Tree is a collaborative program, if their account is closed no one will have access to the individuals in their Private Spaces, to edit Memories in their Memories Gallery, or to their accumulated indexing points, however, all records for deceased individuals will remain in Family Tree and will be available for everyone to work with.
We do not have enough details about her or her account to help you further, therefore, I will be sending you a personal message to get more details so that we can discuss this concern further. Please use the Comment Box below the personal message to continue to correspond about this concern. We look forward to working with you directly. 😚
1 -
While the original poster is helped backchannel, general discussion can continue here.
I think of it this way: the Family Tree person page is not the person. The original poster (OP) did not make a twin of their sister, they just made a duplicate page. Duplicate pages are fungible and no duplicate is more special than another. In all likelihood there are additional duplicates in other contributors' private tree spaces; some of these may pop out later into the public tree and then they will need to be merged.
In my estate plan I may ask someone to go into my FS account and empty out the private tree space: delete all profiles that can be deleted, from any profiles that cannot be deleted just detach all records and delete all details. Dealing with profiles marked Confidential is more complex and requires FS staff assistance. I guess I may need to include instructions on how to do that.
I try to keep my private tree space nearly empty, just using it for short term anchors in various project trees, so I do not inadvertently leave a legacy of zombie profiles.
0
