I am not identified as the owner of the tree

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: How do i delete a entry created by mistake.

Sharon MacCorquodale

I am not identified as the owner of the tree, my great-grandfather is. How do I change this? Or, how do I delete the entire tree and start over?

Thanks,

Sharon Bocklage MacCorquodale

Gail Swihart Watson

Sharon MacCorquodale No one is an owner of the tree, I'm not sure what your great-grandfather owned. Are you talking about his account? It seems you are working from a picture of his tree? (This will probably be split into a new discussion since it is not the original topic, by the way.) If you cannot log in to his account, then you will have to re-do all work he did on people who he created as live people and who he left as live when he stopped updating his tree prior to his death. You should be able to connect to all the ancestors who were marked deceased by him. That is one of the HUGE downsides of FamilySearch. Unlike Ancestry, you cannot apply to get access to a deceased person's account. Ancestry has a process that is not much different than applying for vital records. You provide proof of your identity, of the account holders deceased status, and your relation to the deceased in order to gain access to the account. FamilySearch does not have this (yet!!!).

genthusiast

@Sharon MacCorquodale

Perhaps it would help if you explain where you are seeing your great-grandfather as owner?

In FamilySearch Family Tree (one world shared/open edit Tree) there is no identification of tree ownership - except that any such individual ownership is transferred to FamilySearch (so FamilySearch owns it). Thus - you cannot change ownership of Family Tree. You can contribute to the Tree and your contributions may have your account profile name associated - until some other user may make modification - at which point those artifacts (or whatever those details are actually named programatically) are then associated with that last modified profile user name. The closest anyone comes to ownership of any part of the FamilySearch Family Tree is individually contributed Memories (your memories - photos, documents, stories, audio - are yours) - but again once contributed you license FamilySearch to own them - after all you are storing them on their platform/servers.

There are user genealogies/trees - which individual accounts can contribute - which do retain their profile information as owner (perhaps your great-grandfather did this?) - but those contributed trees are largely separate from FamilySearch Family Tree (sorry if that is confusing - but realize they are two different tree databases).

Therefore, you cannot delete the Tree/tree or anything else that you did not contribute. You can delete your account - that is all.

Reference: FamilySearch Terms of Service

dontiknowyou

We may be getting ahead of ourselves. @Sharon MacCorquodale, what tree are you talking about? Can you give us a URL?