Proof of death for people under 100 years of age
There really should be a requirement that anyone under 100 years of age has to have some kind of proof of death for someone to label them as deceased.
My reasoning for this is that someone made an account and labeled every single one of my father's siblings and him as deceased and honestly it's looking more and more like it was done out of spite and not an honest mistake. All of them are in their 50's and 60's, and I'm fairly certain all of them are alive, but now I'm finding that I have to go in and put in requests that each and every one be changed with reasoning as to why I know it should be changed. For some family members seeing something like this is upsetting and they worry that someone they haven't talked to recently as passed.
Anyone over 100 years of age it's fairly reasonable to be able to mark them as deceased without showing an obituary or other proof of death, but anyone under it's pretty ridiculous to be able to just mark anyone as deceased.
Solving this would improve everyone's experience because I'm sure this isn't the first time this has happened, and really with having an open library that anyone can edit there should be limitations on what people can put in without proof of something being true.
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Unfortunately, the computer can't tell a random newspaper ad from a person's obituary, so enforcing such a requirement would be highly problematic. Like the required death reason when adding some people via Source Linker, it'd also run a high risk of being infuriating.
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What is your suggestion for fixing this then? I offered a suggestion and you've said you don't think it will work and offered nothing in return.
Upon doing a quick search for just "not deceased" there's over 6,000 results and looking through the first dozen or so pages more than half appear to be people in the same boat as I am. Trying to put in edits for people who are not deceased and it's either not going through or it's taking a very long time to fix, setting back things they are working on for a family tree.
Even if it only popped up something that there needs to be an attachment if someone is deceased it wouldn't have to be something that a program scans for, as long as there's a requirement for an attachment of some type it would significantly cut down on both people just trying to bother someone or people accidentally marking deceased. They'd see a pop up that an attachment is required and they would take a second look through what they are submitting.
If you do even a basic search you'd see that this is something that really needs a solution and not just shrug it off as a non-problem.
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My mother's cousin passed away early this month. In the reason box, I wrote a short summary of the phone call informing us -- but that's all the documentation I have, and I'm unlikely to get anything further, basically ever. (He lived in Canada, so no SSDI, and there are no plans for a formal funeral or burial.) How would I be able to comply with your suggested requirement?
The reason I didn't make a counter-suggestion is that I don't have one: the current setup works well enough.
Yes, people erroneously mark profiles as deceased, and yes, it can take a week for a revival request to go through, and yes, it's annoying and worrysome. But it's infuriating to be required to type something in the reason box even though I just finished entering a death date, or a birthdate two centuries ago, and being required to attach something if the birthdate's too recent would most likely result in me deleting the birthdate. How would that be useful?
As for people's motivations for making this error: never ascribe to malice what can be perfectly adequately explained by ...ignorance.
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Here's a possible Idea. If the new Family Group collaboration features will allow following the same living family members/PIDs rather than duplicates - then require two or three of the family members to verify any submission that a living family member is deceased? Either that or make all living to deceased changes pending agreement of several people - more than just one random person (or their duplicate accounts).
We will probably have to wait and see what Family Group collaboration changes look like before having further Ideas.
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Unlike Julia, I don't think the "current setup works well enough". Unfortunately there is no "easy fix" when it comes to mass user participation in an open-edit project like Family Tree.
There is already advice that anyone born less than 110 years ago should be marked with a "Living" status if no evidence / date of death is provided. But how do you (or rather FamilySearch) enforce this?
However, FamilySearch management could help in some ways, especially in limiting the operation of projects that involve adding individuals to the program who (for example) have been found in the 1940 & 1950 US census. Huge amounts of these individuals will still be alive, of course, yet there seems to be little action in highlighting the dangers of adding names from these sources - as well as from obituaries.
If FamilySearch is really serious about there being confidential records for the living within Family Tree it really must do far more to emphasise / publicise the need for checks to be made for the "under 110s" before they are added to the database as "Deceased". Since the publication of the 1950 US census I'm sure the problem must be getting bigger every day - hence one advantage in census records not being published in the U.K. until over 100 years have passed!
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Great ideas here! And the one that would require more than one family member to approve a change like that would actually benefit the site and get families communicating.
And if there's already suggestions for the 110 years then it's not just me asking for something similar. I hope some kind of solution can be found in everyone's suggestions. And not just for users- it would cut down work for the staff too! Seeing the large volume of people who have complaints about this when searching for this coupled with the amount of time it takes them to fix these errors, the staff must have a very large amount of tickets to fix someone erroneously marked deceased. I'd think they would want to cut down on tickets too!
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Well, and here is a bit of proof leading to why there really does need to be more put in place before just anyone can label anyone deceased.
I got a response from the random person who labeled every single of my dad's siblings as deceased. They very plainly told me that they are not only not in the family but don't even know anyone in the family and they actually said that they labeled them as deceased simply because the system allowed them to. Then went on to say that there's lots of incorrect information and inconsistencies here (no surprise if people like them are adding information by the flip of a coin). And then went on to end their message with a slightly threatening note of that "cops & feds" use this site regularly to solve crimes so maybe I shouldn't be messaging just anyone asking questions. So much for them making an honest mistake. 🙄
I've written in to support about them since there appears to be no way to report private messages, which is a whole other problem on this site.
After reading suggestions and going through what I am, I'd say that a good suggestion might be something like If you are in the family tree that you are editing that the suggestion of two or more people approving marking someone under 110 as deceased would work. But if someone isn't in the family tree they are editing they should have to attach some sort of actual evidence of their change (a death certificate, obituary, etc).
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I've written in to support about them since there appears to be no way to report private messages, which is a whole other problem on this site.
There is a method to report abuse in Messages - or you can just decide to Mute/ignore any further messages from the user (of course then you cannot continue collaboration/conversation - but when it is clear that there isn't really any intent to do so ...).
To Report/Mute - click on the user's icon - in the message:
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I don't mind requiring everyone less than 100 to be kept private and invisible, dead or alive. BUT, I must point out, even this is unenforceable because not every person has a birth date established, particularly the farther back you go. MANY people living in the 1700s and back don't have established birth dates.
Thus, there really isn't anything FamilySearch can do other than require a source or an explanation for deceasing someone. I don't like the idea of getting family involved because there quite often isn't a family member interested enough to be involved in genealogy.
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... MANY people living in the 1700s and back don't have established birth dates. ...
If there is any record establishing their existence in 1700s then yes they are probably deceased - whether a birth record can be found or not. Past generations really don't have much to do with maintaining accurate Living profiles.
I don't like the idea of getting family involved because there quite often isn't a family member interested enough to be involved in genealogy.
The Idea mentioned above is for living relations that could/do create a Family Group. That some families may not be interested - does not mean that there are those that are. It isn't that hard to create a FamilySearch account and to maintain a few Living profiles - it's much more difficult to attempt maintaining 4000 deceased ones.
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genthusiast We are not talking about people making decisions, we are talking about what FORCING FUNCTIONS FamilySearch can apply to ensure it is more difficult to make people deceased with out proper proof. Just about ANY person who lived more than 300 years ago may not have sufficient proof that an automated system can work with. Lots of people are sons and daughters of someone only because they are mentioned in a will, but there is otherwise scant proof they ever existed. The will may be dated 1740, so yes, a human can see all children can be deceased, but consider the complex programming required to FS to "know" that someone from that era can be deceased without any direct proof. Look at the original requirement: "There really should be a requirement that anyone under 100 years of age has to have some kind of proof of death for someone to label them as deceased." As long as you can TELL people are under or over 100 years old fine. In fact, many records do not have that direct proof. The proof is in looking at their parents and siblings. Difficult programming!
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We are not talking about people making decisions, we are talking about what FORCING FUNCTIONS FamilySearch can apply...
Living people that HAVE FamilySearch accounts certainly could make decisions about whether any random person submitting their family member as deceased is accurate or not. Such would restrict/impede any random person from submitting their relation as deceased. As such - the FORCING FUNCTION then would be the requirement of those living FamilySearch users to approve of such a submission.
For this Idea, I am not concerned with older generations that don't have documents - they are likely/certainly deceased. Any subsequent descendant generation HAVING such Death event documentation would likely imply decease of that prior generation. Family Tree has Death event fields. Yes a profile may or may not have such documented proofs attached. It has nothing to do with documented LIVING persons (whether within/without FamilySearch platform).
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Gail, you're entirely missing the point here. What I was originally asking for was that people who are UNDER 100 years old to not be marked deceased unless multiple family members do or if there is actual proof of it. What you are talking about (people that were living in the 1700's) is people that are obviously well OVER 100. What you're upset over has literally nothing to do with what I suggested.
And thank you Gen for pointing out the details of reporting from within the messages platform, it's so hidden that I didn't know you could click on someone's name. I'll definitely use that as well!
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On the surface requiring more than one person in a family to verify that a person is deceased would be very frustrating for some of the patrons in our center. They are the ones who have no other family members with a FamilySearch account. This would affect newly baptized members as well. I could see this being very frustrated for them.
The current method may still be the best for now--where family embers notice the error and have it changed. I have had to make this request for my father-in-law a couple of times now, as he is still alive.
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Monica8903 No, I have not missed your point at all, but I did do a poor job of explaining myself, so I will try again. I am thinking like a programmer who has to completely define the logic of a machine's decision making process for interaction with humans. And, the more complex you have that logic, the slower the web site will grind.
For the FamilySearch background processes to comply with your suggestion, the record has to show how old the person is that someone wants to decease. If less than 100, then a source must be attached (or something.). That means there has to be a birth date. For people whose records have a birth date your suggestion is perfect and I agree. What happens when someone wants to decease a record that doesn't have a birth date? Now, most modern deaths (ie, in the last 100 years) are documented with a death date, but not all, so that situation needs to be addressed. The bigger issue with this logic is creating ANY record when you don't know the birth date.
What I want to point out is the unintended consequence that will affect creating new person records for those who lived more than 100 years ago and do not have a birth date because it is not known. Quite often I add new people to the tree who lived and died more than 100 years ago. The scenario I described is a good one: children are named in a will who have not been added to the tree. I create records for these children as needed and currently we are forced to indicate whether they are living or deceased, so I click deceased and I am done. Your suggestion will affect this process. There has to be a way to apply a "bypass" of your suggested roadblocks for preventing live people from being deceased. There needs to be a way to just tell the machine this person lived and died before 1800 and not to worry if I mark them deceased. AND THEN there needs to be another way to detect when that "bypass" is being applied inappropriately on people with no birth dates who would be less than 100 years old today. Humans can usually see that kind of thing by looking at siblings, parents etc, but a logic programming plan is now getting harder. Do you not see how complex this is getting? If all the of this can be addressed without causing more problems, then I am all for it.
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One piece of programming that might be possible (tell me if I am expecting too much!) is that when a birth is entered that is less than 110 years ago, the "Deceased" that appears (as the "default" state) under the Death section (of the Vitals) should automatically be changed to "Living". Otherwise (or also), such entries (birth under 110 years ago) should cause a warning flag to appear, where no death date has been inputted.
Is it impossible to program this? If not, it seems quite a simple solution, as changing "Living" to "Deceased" manually should then be possible once a date of death is inputted.
Obviously, it would seem silly to make "Living" the default status for every ID added to Family Tree, as by far the majority of records are for individuals born well 100 years ago - and definitely deceased!
The ever-increasing problem of inviduals who should have private profiles but don't - due to them carelessly being added as Deceased - is one that FamilySearch should feel responsibility for. It is easy to put all the onus on the contributor (many of which are part of FamilySearch volunteer projects, in any case), but FamilySearch must share some responsibility - in its capacity as publisher of Family Tree - for the apparently huge number of living individuals currently being shown as being deceased.
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Yes, you are approaching the logic from the other end and ignoring the simple fact that persons living today - know they are living - as their relations can usually also fairly readily confirm. This logic can bypass any other logic you might want to apply to the title of this post (ignoring the basic problem of the Idea in favor of rigidly holding to what the Idea initially put forward. Ideas can morph just as well as Tree profiles).
So. From the other end - living people can create Family Groups and populate them with profiles of their living relations. If someone else claims one of those living relations is deceased (obviously not the living record/account profile) - then FamilySearch logic could immediately suspend creation of that deceased record, notify the Family Group - which can then check 'is [someone] deceased?' - if yes, and several Family Group members reply to confirm/deny that case - then the deceased profile creation could proceed/be denied (whichever the case). Such would have 'no effect' on marking deceased any person created with records attached from well over 100 years ago - nor prevent creation of a deceased profile with no records attached for someone for whom their is no FamilySearch account/profile (I guess that might be a little incentive to have an account - deny your own death. ... "Wait they are still contributing to the Tree! They can't be dead!").
I don't know how 'huge' the problem is - which is probably why the process hasn't changed from the current method - which has been for a long time (a living relation saying 'no they are not deceased.'). Generally the 'huger' problem in Tree is the effect upon any profile that any single user submission can have (the responsibility lies there) - if incorrect - as in the case of claiming a living person is deceased - thus my almost constant referral/Idea that Family Groups could have a maintenance oversight/impedance role for the undesirable change of family member profiles (which yes individuals can also have if Following profiles).
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@genthusiast, my guess is that erroneously-deceased profiles are basically never created from previously-living ones. If you have a person entered as living, you only change him to deceased if you acquire information about his death. So your proposed process -- if I'm understanding it correctly -- would never actually apply.
For purposes of this idea, we need to divide profiles into three groups to start: those with an entered birthdate more than 100 (or 110) years ago, those with an entered birthdate more recent than that, and those with no entered birthdate.
The idea is pretty clear about the first two groups: there would be no change from current procedures for the first one, and some sort of documentation requirement for the second.
What to do with the third group is where it starts to get Really Complicated Really Fast. I see two options: undated births would either go in group one, or the computer would try to determine an approximate timeframe and proceed accordingly. The third option, of treating all undated births as recent, is unworkable: it'd result in a documentation requirement that believed in vampires or other immortal beings.
If undated births were treated as "not recent", then people could just stop entering recent birthdates to get around the documentation requirement. It'd be simple, both in terms of programming and of user response, and the result would be, on average, a less-accurate tree with more-annoyed users.
That leaves us with the computer trying to determine a timeframe for undated births. FS already has something like this in place when creating profiles via Source Linker. I don't use it often enough to have figured out the actual numbers/dates, but I do know that it's based on the indexed event date: if that is too recent, then the process requires a death reason statement for everyone you add from the index. This results in the infuriating situation where it wants me to explain why I know a person is deceased when I just finished entering his death date and place, and/or his birthdate two centuries ago. (It's even worse when the index got the century wrong and cannot be corrected.)
As Gail wrote, human beings can determine a profile's approximate time frame relatively easily: we know that a person who appears in an 1840 census doesn't have any living children, or that a person who died in 1930 does not have living parents. This kind of reasoning can be programmed, but it's not a trivial task, especially when you get into some of the less-robust parts of the Tree where nobody has bothered to enter any dates for five or ten generations. And, as demonstrated by Source Linker's implementation, the primary result of such determinations is annoyance.
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genthusiast Not everyone has close family working in FamilySearch. I have only one sister in law and one husband of a paternal birth half sister of an adopted relative of mine. (My adopted relative's parents never married each other; they married other people.)
I found a person erroneously deceased on my adopted relative's maternal birth family line. While I had a phone conversation with my relative's birth mom to confirm, I know of no one working in FamilySearch to confirm that knowledge. I marked him alive myself and his record disappeared into somebody's private space.
What that means is I would have no one to collaborate with to confirm a death. And, I just realized, I wonder if I would even be considered family of my birth relative's family? Hm.
Requiring multiple family to confirm a death sounds like a good OPTIONAL function.
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my guess is that erroneously-deceased profiles are basically never created from previously-living ones. If you have a person entered as living, you only change him to deceased if you acquire information about his death. So your proposed process -- if I'm understanding it correctly -- would never actually apply.
@Julia Szent-Györgyi no you misunderstood - even if a profile is created from a random record and selected as deceased (obviously by someone else and possibly someone unknowingly doing so erroneously - by the way, this is a very good reason to attach records to living people - so that others don't have to in error) - the routine could check that record/relations for a similar/equivalent living profiles (that could already be attached/loaded into record 'memory' - it wouldn't necessitate slowing down profile creation - or if the record is actually already 'attached to Tree then same difference...) and interrupt such deceased creation (since it already has living profile 'attached') - or if a living profile is detected through search at that point (no living profile 'attached').
Not everyone has close family working in FamilySearch. ... What that means is I would have no one to collaborate with to confirm a death.
Easily remedied - invite a family member to join or since Family Tree is open-edit - collaborate with anyone else - preferably someone related to the family but if no one else is REALLY available to confirm - sure anyone else that you can convince the person is alive - who knows ... Maybe even a FamilySearch representative - since that's the current process ...
Also - the fact that some may not have others that care to keep living family profiles accurate/living should not exclude those Family Groups that do.
General topic comment: Maybe the thing to do would be to have FamilySearch 'hide' all records that are attached to Living profiles - meaning currently if someone attaches a record to a Living person - someone else can still search, create and attach that record to another duplicate/deceased profile (at least to my understanding)? That way maybe someone else wouldn't erroneously create a deceased profile for a Living person - obviously they can't attach what can't be found. I think then that might just leave those creating them from 'memory' (obviously FamilySearch can't hide people's faulty memory/action) or possibly maliciousness ...
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"I am thinking like a programmer who has to completely define the logic of a machine's decision making process for interaction with humans. And, the more complex you have that logic, the slower the web site will grind."
Gail, I'm going to assume here you don't actually do any programming for websites. A date/age calculator isn't complicated by any means. Nearly every website uses them (including this one). It doesn't slow anything down. That coding has been around nearly as long as websites have.
"I create records for these children as needed and currently we are forced to indicate whether they are living or deceased, so I click deceased and I am done. Your suggestion will affect this process. There has to be a way to apply a "bypass" of your suggested roadblocks for preventing live people from being deceased."
This is exactly the problem with this website that needs to be addressed and fixed. Instead of marking everyone as deceased simply because it's the easiest way to use this website currently, there needs to be a way to mark them as living without dates, or even just not fill anything out. I am not suggesting "roadblocks" I'm suggesting that there needs to be a fix to stop people from having to fill out 7+ forms to have an entire side of the family fixed and then the staff here having to go in and check 7+ forms for a family and fix each of them manually. I didn't start this thread just because I was annoyed with having to fill out so many forms for myself, I made it because there is an issue with the way this site functions and I wanted to open up discussion to get more ideas why it functions this way and how it could be fixed. That is typically what a suggestion forum is for. So the people running this site can see what people think and what is working and what isn't working for them so they can improve it. This issue is needlessly causing a ton of work for both the staff here and people just trying to look up their family trees. If it was just one person that would be fine, but when you have an entire side of your family all marked deceased and the only reason is that it was "easier" to do that than to spend the time to do actual research it becomes a problem for everyone. It shouldn't just be "oh well that's how the site runs" it should be that there is a fix for it.
Yes, mistakes happen with inputting information, but that isn't what is happening here. What is happening is the site needs to be improved so people can add in more people to a family tree without having to purposely add incorrect information that then has to be noticed first by a family member who puts in a form, then a staff member that fields the ticket. That isn't a way to have a site like this function, it makes no sense to keep doing it this way.
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