Contacting and helping people do family trees
Hi community, I am new to this site, I originally found that someone had done part of my mother's family tree and listed my mom as deceased, which she is not. So I contacted admin and asked if they could change that, which they did but I was then told that I couldn't see the family tree which someone had started because of privacy laws, and I get that. I was just wondering if there was any way to contact (without breaking any laws) and help if I can, the person who started my mother's family tree?
Answers
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Just so we're all starting from the same place: nobody has a separate, private family tree on FamilySearch. The Family Tree is a single shared tree that we can all edit or add to as we see fit, with the goal of one -- and only one -- profile per deceased person.
The only exception hinges on the word "deceased": FamilySearch protects privacy by keeping profiles for living people in the "private spaces" of the users who created the profiles. When someone mistakenly marks a profile as "deceased", and another user finds it and alerts FS to the error, the profile is moved to the creator's private space. This renders it no longer visible to the person who discovered it.
However, it is highly unlikely that a user only entered or worked on that single, now-invisible profile. Chances are, he or she also entered that person's parents and siblings, some of whom are likely to actually be deceased and therefore public.
So to find and get in touch with the user who mistakenly marked your mother as "deceased", look for profiles of your mother's deceased relatives. The person who most recently edited a conclusion will be identified under that conclusion, and you can find other contributors in the profile's Change Log (accessed by clicking Show All under Latest Changes). To contact a contributor, click his or her name and choose Message.
You may need to contact several people, and they may take a while to reply -- or not reply at all, unfortunately. (Many people opt not to be notified of messages except when they log in, and then proceed to forget their logins. But I have had one such user eventually reply to a message, three years later, so there's always hope.)
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