Allow Living Spouses to Connect Real Accounts

Jalene Marie Alvies Rushton

I think we should have access to the account of our spouse even if they are living, for the purpose of completing family history work together. Because I cannot connect my spouses actual account I can not know what work needs to be done unless I add in each person individually. It seems silly to me, and a simple fix.

I understand privacy laws, but the church has the record of our sealing, so I would like it to show it here on the family tree and have access to his family.

Gordon Collett

FamilySearch has announced several times over the past many years that they were working on a way to have sharing between accounts and the Family Groups feature was apparently a step towards that but at this point either some complexities in the programming or the complexities of coming up with something that satisfies the privacy laws of every country in the world seem to be preventing the release of further features.

If you are talking about working on your husbands deceased relatives, the only people you need to add in individually through your account are the minimum number of living people to link up with those deceased relatives. So all you need to add are your husband, his parents, and and any living grandparents. At most that is only six people and you only need to add their names, sex, and check Living.Then you can link up to all the existing entries of his deceased relatives in Family Tree.

To be perfectly clear, here is what I see in Family Tree:

Red = Living

Green = Deceased

I have a profile for my wife that is different than what she sees in Family Tree because she is living. Likewise with her father under the red block for him. Otherwise, all the green blocks are deceased people and she and I see the one and only profile for each of them without any duplicates.

When my wife signs in, she see a duplicate profile for me since she cannot see the living profile I see, but since she has linked her copy of me to my deceased parents, she sees the same profiles I do and can work on those profiles all she wants.

Now if there are a lot of living people under your husband's account and you are talking about working on those profiles, then you have the option of clicking on the ? help icon, choosing Helper Resources, and adding you husband to your planner like this:

Then whenever you want to work on one of your husband's living people, just come here and click on his name to enter helper mode. Then you can function just as if you were he and he was signed in, including seeing all the living people profiles he can see.