Edit date of death
Hello
Someone added a record to my family tree that is incorrect.
I cannot edit the date of death for this person, but was able to edit the place of death.
How can I change the date of death?
Thank you.
Answers
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What is the person's Familysearch id (fsid) - typically format with numbers and letters (xXxX-xxx)?
Edit death date changed by a recently attached source: You can usually click that id and go to the person's Details to change the date and give a source/reason for the change. If the source has an incorrect date but is for the correct person - if that field is not editable you won't be able to change the date on the source.
Edit death date and detach incorrect source: Of course, if the source is referencing a different person - detach it from your ancestor and give the reason for why the source does not match. You can do this from the Sources attached to the ancestor - view/open the source and choose Detach.
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Thank you, I will try that.
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I did the above, but it didn't work. I cannot edit through clicking on the ID #. When I click on the name, the info is correct, because I entered the information. The problem is with the ID link, it is incorrect for many people on the list. It is not an error of mine, but with the ID link/site or whatever the site is generating the source . These are individuals who have passed recently and I have the info with the correct dates.
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@lynette65, I wonder if you're confusing profile IDs, index entries (which can also have seven-character hyphenated strings as identifiers), and the "similar records" list in the right-hand column of index detail pages.
FamilySearch is a vast sprawl of many different parts. Those parts are interconnected in various ways, but it's important to distinguish them, because they work very differently from each other.
One major part is the collaborative, open-edit Family Tree, which has the (lofty and distant) goal of one and only one profile per deceased person. A profile collects what users of FS know (or believe) about a specific person: names, birth and death dates and places, and things like residences and occupations. Individual profiles can be connected to the individual profiles of all of that person's immediate family members, with two types of relationship (parent/child and spouse or partner). The profile also provides a means of attaching source references for all of these conclusions.
Another major part of FS's sprawl is the ginormous collection of document images. Many of these were originally microfilms, which have all now been scanned (digitized), while more recently-acquired parts were scanned straight to digital files from the paper documents. Whenever contracts and privacy laws allow, FS makes these digital images available online.
The "connecting piece" between the Tree and the document images is the third major part of FS: the database of index entries. An index takes a volunteer's reading of a few key elements from a document and puts it into a database that the computer can parse, to make that document easier for us to find. Indexes are by definition incomplete, and they're also prone to misreadings and other errors. Some such errors can be user-corrected on FS, others cannot.
Because indexes are computer-parseable, while images aren't (yet), and because sometimes the index is all that's here (i.e., the images aren't available on FS for one of many possible reasons), FS's systems primarily work with index entries: they're what Source Linker attaches to Family Tree profiles, they're what the hinting system on the Tree suggests, and they're what the "similar records" list contains.
Each of these three major parts of FS can be linked to the others: you can attach a document image or an index entry as a source reference on a profile, index entries are connected to the originating image (if available), and if an index entry has been attached to a profile, that connection is shown in search results, the entry's details page, and on "similar records" lists. Also, if an image has index entries associated with it, they're shown in the image viewer.
(The above is the ideal. The amount of material on FS is unfathomably large, and there are many ways that things go wrong. For example, the index-to-image associations can be off by several images, especially on older indexes.)
To work with these three major parts, FS has various search interfaces, such as Search - Records for indexes, Find for Tree profiles, and the Catalog for documents (or images thereof). There are also various tools specific to each part, such as profile pages and chart views for the Tree, the old image viewer for browsing through images, and the new viewer-and-editor for both looking at/browsing through images and for fixing the associated index entries. (Unfortunately, like most multitaskers, the tool is not as good at any of its tasks as a unitasker would be.) And finally, there are various tools specifically for making connections between the parts: as previously mentioned, there's Source Linker for connecting Tree profiles and index entries; there's an Attach to Family Tree process on both the old and new image viewers, which allows a direct linkage between image and profile (without an intervening index); and there's the "-and-editor" part of the new viewer for correcting some errors in indexes. (Users cannot correct all such errors, and the system has many bugs and gremlins which make the attempt generally ill-advisable, currently.)
Unfortunately, our ability to include screenshots in Community posts has still not been fixed, so I'm unable to include pictures of what I'm talking about above; I've resorted to example links on some of the key phrases (bolded to make the link easier to see).
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