Better way to prevent people from entering living people as deceased?
Help! Again, (for the 3rd time!) I am having to try to get FS to mark my living siblings as living and not as deceased, and we aren't even that old. Some 'well-meaning' uninformed distant relative has used our parents' obituaries to add us to FS, marking us deceased. This is getting old. I messaged the person (still not sure who he is) and told him my sister is not dead and asked him to mark her living. Hasn't done it yet. I contacted FS and am waiting for them to do it. I dismissed all the hints and unattached people listed in the obit, but know that with the 1950 census we will be seeing it all over again for those who are listed in that census who are still alive.
Can FS simply not allow people to be entered as deceased after a certain year WITHOUT a death date and source?
Answers
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I certainly agree with the idea that people born within a certain period (e.g. 100 years) should have stricter rules for being set to deceased. When these people are set as deceased, their personal details are exposed to the world, and it is a serious breach of privacy.
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The same thing is happening to me right now. My sister-in-law and her husband are connected to her grandparents as her parents and all listed as deceased. As you would expect, no sources. I've deleted the relationships but can't merge the deceased record out because she's still alive. Is this getting any attention?
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There is no real way to prevent this, as any timing restrictions would prevent adding anyone who has been deceased before the set time frame. Requiring a death date and source would prevent adding older relatives where you are unable to locate such a source.
Any information added from an obituary cannot be a breach of privacy as that information is a matter of public record. Google yourself you will find far more personal information than anyone could on Family Search. And if you are really concerned about privacy don't use any social media accounts such as Facebook.
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@Jon Saunders_1, disconnecting them isn't going to help.
There are two ways to fix a profile that has been erroneously marked as "deceased": contact the user who created the profile, or get FS to do it. As far as I know, the first method only works if nobody else has edited the profile. If you've changed the relationships and stuff, then don't even bother bugging the user. (Well, except to tell him/her that s/he made a mistake and please don't do it again.)
To submit a dead-to-living request to FS, edit the Death fact in the Vitals box and choose Living, then click Save. Fill in the reason and click Submit. FS staff will read your reason and mark the profile as Living if they agree with you. This will make it disappear from public view, into the private space of the person who created the profile.
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There is no real way to prevent this, as any timing restrictions would prevent adding anyone who has been deceased before the set time frame. Requiring a death date and source would prevent adding older relatives where you are unable to locate such a source.
One way to prevent this would be to keep deceased people without a death date Private, just like living people are, if they are less than 110 years old. That would put no restriction on entering them. It would, however, encourage people to do that little bit of research required to find death information.
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The issue then is the collaborative nature of the tree, where someone else may have that information but is now unable to share it with you because they are unaware of the entry you created. On multiple occasions another family member was able to "fill in the blanks" for these entries I created.
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Since it is a collaborative tree, that means that that other person who has death information can create his own version of the record which will not be private because it has a death date. I will be able to see that copy letting me add the death date to my copy to make it public, merge them, and continue on with research.
Putting false data in the tree, by marking someone as deceased who is not, does not lead to good collaboration.
Go to the Community Home page and put "living marked as deceased" and variations of this in the top search box to see what a common problem this is and how concerned people are with these errors.
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If your two branches of the tree are not connected and you have not created a person for Family Search to make a suggestion that a duplicate may exist, than the deceased person's information may not be found especially if FS does not have any related death records to suggest.
It is only false if you are doing it intentionally, which I do not believe most people are. Most people here have good intentions as I know I do.
Good collaboration is when that correct party is POLITELY notified that the person they created is not deceased and they happily make the correction to living. Unfortunately what I have found far too many times is that the communication is not polite and that is not productive for a collaborative environment.
Perception is key, it is not possible to know the living/death status of everyone in the world.
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Two matters that appear to be getting out of hand in Family Tree are this issue and the (seemingly) ever-increasing number of locked records of the deceased.
Regarding the latter, there seems to be no logic - is it a machine, a person, or combination of both that decides large parts of this collaborative project are not available for edit?
On the issue raised here, there has to be a better way of FamilySearch retaining some sort of consistency over details visible of the living. Just because information is available elsewhere doesn't mean FamilySearch has to publish it - especially if it affects privacy issues. Otherwise, why bother keeping the IDs for the living in our private spaces?
These issues should be thoroughly reviewed to ensure consistency in the approach to the privacy of records of the living - and in allowing maximum access to records of the deceased.
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It is only false if you are doing it intentionally, which I do not believe most people are. Most people here have good intentions as I know I do.
Hummm.... Are you sure you meant to phrase things this way? Are you saying that if someone is born in 1850 but I don't know when he was born and put in 1830 then that 1830 is true? That it is only if I know his birth year is 1850 and I put in 1830 that 1830 becomes false? I don't think I can agree with that. If someone is alive and I claim he is dead, my claim is false whether I realize I am mistaken or not.
You do make a good point about collaboration. It would be wonderful if people would monitor their messages, discuss common problems, and learn from each other. The opening post here shows how collaboration should work: someone notices an error and sends a message explaining the problem, the person who made the error corrects the problem, learns the important research tip that not everyone listed in an obituary is dead and never makes that mistake again. Unfortunately this is not happening.
Perception is key, it is not possible to know the living/death status of everyone in the world.
But we are not talking about everyone in the world, just people born after 1912. All my wife's grandparents were born before that. All my grandparents were born before that. We are talking about someone's very close relatives here. We are talking about fairly simple research to find death dates. If someone died after 1980, often just googling them will bring up obituaries. For deaths prior to 1970 the various digitized newspaper collections are a great resource. Find-A-Grave, Billion Graves, all the other cemetery databases provide vast numbers of records giving death information. There really is no reason for people to make no effort whatsoever to document that someone who is less than 110 years old is truly deceased before marking them as such. "I can't find a death record therefore they must be dead" is neither logical nor acceptable. Neither is "those other database subscriptions are too expensive so I'm just going to make up information."
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We are talking about fairly simple research to find death dates.
Many contributors here seem to have no idea how Family Tree works, and assume it is just like Ancestry.com or whatever other resource they are familiar with. This is partly FamilySearch's doing, by making Family Tree a "zero entry pool": easy for anyone to get in, very shallow, but there is a slippery slope into the deep end.
My point of entry to all things FS was the mobile device app, which is very simplified. I had the feeling I was working in a void, apparently alone and in private, even though I knew it was a global tree. Imagine the shock and embarrassment felt by contributors who mistakingly think their doings are private, not knowing there are watchers?
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Some 'well-meaning' uninformed distant relative has used our parents' obituaries to add us to FS, marking us deceased.
This may be due to the obituaries. There are huge batches of robotically indexed obituaries in which all the named relatives are marked deceased. Several times I have reported this problem to FamilySearch.
@ChristensenChristine1 could use the source linker to check the obituary records. Do they show living persons as deceased?
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Many contributors here seem to have no idea how Family Tree works, and assume it is just like Ancestry.com or whatever other resource they are familiar with.
If, @dontiknowyou, you mean by this comment that most people who mark living people as deceased do so because they don't think it matters because they think they are in a private tree where no one else can see what they are doing in "their tree," then that is even a better reason to leave those people less than 110 years old without death information in users' private spaces since that is where those users think they are.
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Hello @dontiknowyou ,
If your parents are living and you are the one who entered them, a person should not be able to mark them as deceased. If they entered your parents it is different.
Here is a bit of information from the Help ?.
If you are not the only contributor:
- 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
- How you know that the person is alive
- If possible, the living person's current physical address
- Click Submit.
Then I would recommend editing the sources for the "deceased parents" during a merge of your parents with the erroneously labeled "deceased" parents.
Here is the link to the article.
Best withes.
Anitra
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Yes, the obituary showed all of us as living.
I understand people make mistakes all the time in their zeal to add people to the shared family tree. I know I do. But making a mistake in error (misspelling a name, etc) is not the same as intentionally marking a person deceased when you have no evidence they are deceased unless they were born more than 110 years ago.
In my case, my parents were born in 1936, died in 2013. The obituary showed all children living, yet we were still all entered as deceased by a person, not by a computer.
My personal rule is I never add someone born after 1912 unless I find a death date and source. Even when they are linked with the family on the census, I either mark them living or do not add their name to the family.
I am simply asking FS to find a way to make it much more difficult for someone to add someone as deceased who was born before 110 years without a death date and source.
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Yeh -- you would think there would at least be a warning of the issues that can arise by marking a person as deceased when you dont know they are.
The idea is not to prevent people from entering 20th century people as deceased
The idea is simply to make it harder for it to be done for a living person and to make sure people know the consequences and also realize this is not their private family tree - but a public collaborative tree.
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@ChristensenChristine1 do you know how to alert FamilySearch? Edit the death date, change Deceased to Living, and add a brief explanation. FamilySearch staff will take care of it.
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