Connecting family/ duplicate
I think it would be great if living people were visible to everyone. This would illuminated so many duplicate people when someone passes. Also it would help with connecting with other people in the family. I tried to create a family group so my sister and cousins could see and connect to our family tree and add to it. However it still wouldn't let them see the living members I had added, so they had to make a page of their own. When we add children to our page they also have to add another page for the same person on their line. When that person passes they will all have to be merged together which is very time consuming.
Also, some of my cousins know a lot more about certain parts of the family than I do, but I can't see what they add because of the living people not showing up. This is so frustrating. I love working on the genealogy be it is so hard to share with other family members.
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"if living people were visible to everyone." Sorry, but no. Especially not "everyone". It would drive a huge hole through all the privacy and data protection legislation in the world.
I appreciate that there are problems when researchers die - if their research is only in FamilyTree, then all their research into living people will die with them. There is justification for saying that this is a pain. There have been various discussions about "digital legacies" - e.g. leaving the password to your Facebook account to someone so that they can close it down properly. And I think I remember discussions in here about adopting a similar approach to a researcher's data about living people - allow them to nominate a recipient who could then have access to all of their research data in FSFT after their death. Whether that idea has got anywhere, I don't know.
But the basic problem - whether the researcher is alive or not - remains the same. Their research data is private and has been subject to no standards or checks. The living people who are in their "private area" probably haven't given their permission to the researcher, nor have they been able to check that the data held about them is correct. So long as that data is held privately, it (generally) escapes the data legislation - but as soon as access is given to other people, it probably comes under the scope of that legislation.
Is there a case for saying that nominating a single person to receive access in the event of a researcher's death, would still come under the heading of "private data" so continue to be outside the scope of privacy and data protection legislation? I don't know - I could argue either way, I suspect. But It gets tricky for FamilySearch when you realise that they have to satisfy all the legislation across all the world... If US legislation permitted something and European Union legislation didn't - how do you handle data input by a US based researcher about an EU citizen? Not easy...
Sorry - it is a pain but it isn't easy, either...
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@RachelJames5, the internet is not the place to keep track of your living family. The best way to protect data from privacy breaches is to not put it online in the first place, anywhere.
Profiles for living people on FamilySearch's Family Tree should merely be connectors. You shouldn't be entering people's vital statistics on them, or spending any time on them. That's not what Family Tree is for. The Tree is for tracing deceased people.
For example, I've entered my aunt Csilla so that I could connect to her late husband and collaborate with their grandson in his forays into genealogy, but I have not made a profile for my father's other living sibling: she's unmarried, so she does not connect to anyone that my deceased father doesn't connect to already. On aunt Csilla's profile, I've entered her given name -- and that's it. Nothing else. It doesn't need more for me to know who that is, and I'm the only one who needs to be able to recognize the profile.
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"many Members of the Church, DO have and include their Living Family members; which, includes extended ones, in Family Tree of FamilySearch, by choice."
Indeed. But the point is - who can see that data? If a Church member includes their Living Family members in FS FamilyTree, then according to everything that I've been told, only the Church member who's done the including can see the data. And when that Church Member dies, no-one can ever see that data that they included. Which arguably is a waste, but arguably is the only way of satisfying legislation.
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"NO, Never, a waste of time"
Sorry - I'm not getting my point over properly.
Suppose Researcher X dies and at the point of their death, they have a dozen profiles in their private area marked as "living" (or not marked as "deceased"). From that point on, no-one can ever access those dozen profiles and to that extent, what remains of X's work has been arguably wasted because no-one else can use it further down the line.
On the other hand, X might have made an awful lot of use of the data on those dozen profiles before they die, so that part of the work was not wasted then.
Whether or not FS can indeed develop something that satisfies all legislation (more to the point, something that their lawyers agree satisfies all legislation), I don't know. But until then I'd say that you have to rely on email, messaging, etc, to transmit private data.
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