Records of my deceased Armenian relatives occasionally become confidential. How to get it fixed?
Hello, I have a recurring problem where records of my Armenian relatives occasionally become confidential, even though they are deceased. It happens when I add location information regarding Armenia, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, or Iran, but it does not happen every time, so I am not sure why it happens sometimes and not others. FamilySearch Staff have helped fixed the records in the past, and they told me to make a new post in the community when it happens again.
I check my list of private persons often because this is a recurring problem. When I checked today (August 12), I noticed a new record on my list of private persons: Jacob Lazarus Iskyan GFH4-53H. I have not done any research on this person for awhile, but the change log states that I created the record and added all the sources today.
I suspect that another user made some edits today on the original record, which sparked the automatic generation of a new record that is confidential/private to me. If you go to the Memories tab for this person and click on either of the documents, you will see that they were uploaded by a different user today. This is contrary to what is shown in the change log, which states that I uploaded the memories (not true). So I am guessing that the edits by this other user sparked the system to generate an entirely new record for Jacob Lazarus Iskyan that is now private/confidential. I did not save the ID for the original record, so I am not sure what happened to it.
A similar thing happened to me in the past when I was collaborating on a record for Karekin Sobaje GHLF-738. After my edits, this record disappeared, and was replaced by a private/confidential record with the same name and sources but different ID: GXT5-TW1. The change log for this new record states that I created it and added all the sources, but this is not true either. If you go to the Memories tab and click the document there, you can see that someone else uploaded the memory. FamilySearch Staff helped to make this new record GXT5-TW1 public, but the original GHLF-738 is still missing. I'm not sure if the specialty team decided not to restore it on purpose, or if it was an oversight.
The problem of Armenian records automatically reverting to private/confidential like this is a big obstacle to collaboration on our Armenian ancestry and is quite frustrating. If someone could please make the record for Jacob Lazarus Iskyan GFH4-53H public, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Answers
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There are certain countries whose former residents are automatically marked as confidential. Most are Islamic and Middle Eastern. I believe there have been instances where the public availability of information about deceased people from these countries has put living descendants and relatives in danger.
See this help article: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/where-did-the-people-on-the-private-persons-list-in-family-tree-come-from
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I believe Daniel is well aware of the general issue, but there is a lot of inconsistency on this matter, indicating there is not a set piece of coding whereby there is some automatic marking as confidential.
This is an issue only a FamilySearch team can - and should - investigate. Both confidential and locked records should be kept to an absolute minimum, but many recent reports indicates this is not the case.
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