My mother has been listed as deceased by a person that is not a family member. Need help with this
Answers
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We are sorry for this unfortunate situation.
We will forward your question/request to our Specialty Department for review and resolution. You may be contacted by that department for more information.
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Hello @KimMc1
You should be able to correct this issue by changing the status from dead to living. When you make this change the record will move back into the contributor's private space.
As you are not the only contributor to this record, here are the steps to follow:
- Navigate to the person page of the individual who is living.
- Click Details.
- In the Vitals section, next to the listed death date, select Edit.
- In the box that appears, click the circle labeled Living.
- Enter how you know the person is still alive.
- Click Save.
- Enter an explanation for the system administrator to review your request. Please provide this information:
- Your relationship to the individual needing attention.
- And how you know the person is alive.
- If possible, the living person's current physical address.
- Click Submit.
A request now goes to FamilySearch Support. A system administrator reviews your request and takes appropriate actions.
Here is the link to the knowledge article from our Help Center from which the above instructions were taken:
Thank you for bringing this problem to the Community forum. Protection of the privacy of individuals and families is a high priority at FamilySearch, so be sure to implement this change as soon as possible.
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in the meantime, I’ve learned the person who did this, Jackie Tyau Sonomura, has created duplicate ID’s for both my parents which complicates this issue further. I want to delete both profiles this person has created.
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Thank you. in the meantime, I’ve learned the person who did this, Jackie Tyau Sonomura, has created duplicate ID’s for both my parents which complicates this issue further. I want to delete both profiles this person has created.
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You cannot delete a profile that someone else created. If nobody else has contributed to a profile, then the creator can delete it, so the first thing you should do is send a message to Jackie about the errors and duplicates. You can do this by clicking her name next to any of her contributions.
However, given how long people can take to respond to FamilySearch's internal messaging, I would go ahead and submit the request to change your mom's status to living, as the mod outlined above. It's a privacy issue and should be addressed as soon as possible.
For the duplicate of your dad, if the profile's creator doesn't respond (or you just get impatient), you can "merge it away". If the system doesn't offer up the duplicate in Research Help, you can use "Merge by ID" (under Tools in the right-hand column on the details page).
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I just don’t agree with this action. Someone who doesn’t even know my mother has created a false profile. This is very upsetting to my family that someone would do this. My sister who incidentally just passed away, was married to someone named Tyau for approximately 2 years in the 90’s and there has been zero contact with this family since her divorce in 1992. I understand extended Tyau family none of us even know may want to do some family research but they can’t make it up as they go along which is the case here. I will not be reaching out to this person and I insist Family Search take the false profile down immediately. What is to prevent anyone from creating false information maliciously which I believe is the case here.
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First: Don't attribute to malice what can be perfectly adequately explained by laziness and/or confusion.
Second: MNuttall detailed the procedure for asking FamilySearch to make your mother's profile private. That's as close as they ever get to taking down profiles for actual people, and it is one of the very few ways that their staff ever intervenes in Family Tree.
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You may think it’s confusion but I disagree. This was a very bitter divorce 30 years ago and my parents had to care for my sister during it so Tyau family in Honolulu no my mother. There is no available information for them to think my mother is deceased and apparently they used a 1940 census to create the profile choosing to ignore the profile already created. Is there someone else I can talk to about this situation? My mother may have a heart attack if she see this.
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@KimMc1, would you like me to submit the dead-to-living request for your mom's profile, with a link to this Community thread as the reason? It's really not a big deal to clean this up, and I really don't think there was any malice involved. Many people automatically assume that everyone in a public record, such as the 1940 census, must be deceased, because otherwise it wouldn't be a public record, right? It isn't until they discover the third or fourth person who they know to be living that they start rethinking their assumptions.
(The usual phrasing of the admonition ["Hanlon's razor"] is less polite than "laziness and/or confusion".)
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Yes, this matter needs to be cleaned up. No one should assume anything when they create a profile. It should be done with responsibility and care as not to create a cloud of inaccurate information for future generations. Like I said, a profile for my mother already existed and was created years ago. There is absolutely no reason to keep the inaccurate profile available just because someone created it that either did not know what they were doing or did so deliberately. I have no way of knowing why but it is wrong as my mother is alive and well in Ames, OK in the same house she has lived in nearly 60 years. Thanks for your help.
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Dear Kim,
Thank you for contacting FamilySearch and bringing your concern to our attention. A correction has been made to the record, indicating the individual is living. Due to rights of privacy, you will no longer see this record if you did not create it.
You have already created a record for your living mother, and that record is only visible to you as the creator as long as it remains a record for a living person. That may be one reason why the contributor created another profile for your mother--she cannot see the more accurate one you have created.
Kind regards,
FamilySearch Data Administration
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Kim, I'm sorry that in all of our replies to you, none of us considered the possibility that part of the reason for your ire and assumption of malice is a misunderstanding of how the Tree on FamilySearch works.
The fact that's most pertinent here is that profiles that are marked "living" only exist in the private space of the account that created them. Nobody else can see them, or even see that they exist. For example, for everyone but me, my father's profile has no relationships to a spouse or children.
The user (jAckie) who created the profile for your mother does not know about your profile for her, because that is only visible to you. JAckie did make a mistake, but it was not in creating the profile. She needed that in order to link to the deceased members of the family. Her mistake was marking said profile as "deceased", which made it public. She should have done some basic looking, and after not finding any death information, she should have erred on the side of privacy. (It's generally best to assume living unless proven otherwise for anyone born less than 110 years ago.)
Creating a duplicate profile for your dad was also technically a mistake on jAckie's part, but I can imagine it being done out of politeness: perhaps she didn't want to "intrude" into your family, having some idea about the acrimonious divorce. Really the easiest way to resolve all of this would be to contact her via FS's internal messaging, but with the understanding that it may take a while for her to receive the message.
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It is really easy to mark a profile deceased by mistake. And then if someone else edits the profile, perhaps to leave a testy note about the person being alive, its creator no longer can mark it living or delete it. The only remedy then is to request intervention by FT staff.
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