living and deceased family members
it seems counter - intuitive to me that we have to request to change a profile back to living, after someone has mistakenly changed them to deceased,
but anyone can change a profile to deceased without having to request it.
Im asking because someone went through profiles Ive entered of relatives and did such things as change my moms name, and marked my uncle as deceased and even had him buried. I was surprised to find I couldnt restore him to the land of the living 'toute suite', but must wait for someone to review the request.
does this make sense?
Answers
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There is a good reason for the difference in behavior. To understand this difference, it can be helpful to consider what happens to the public visibility of the person profile.
A person profile that is living is visible only to me. Nothing I do to it will be seen by you or anyone else. When I change a person profile from living to deceased, I am not affecting anyone else. I am essentially making a gift of my private profile to the whole community of Family Tree users. It is no longer just my personal property, but now belongs to the shared community of Family Tree users. That change requires no review.
But it's an entirely different situation when I want to change the status from Deceased to Living. This is starting with a person profile that is currently visible to all Family Tree users. This profile doesn't belong to me alone, but is shared property. Changing it to Living status will remove it from that shared status, and it will become visible only to me. Or if someone else created that profile, the change to Living will make it visible only to them. That is a big change that is worthy of review, since other users may be following that person or relying on that person in relationships, attached memories or sources, or many other purposes.
If you mistakenly change a person from Living to Deceased, and no one else has made changes to that person in the meantime, you can indeed change them back to Living with no additional review required. But if someone else made a mistake and changed a person from Living to Deceased, you shouldn't be able to do that so easily, since changing them back to Living will remove them from public view (including the fact that you will no longer be able to see that person profile, either) and the creator of that profile will now be solely responsible for managing that Living profile. That proposed change clearly needs to be reviewed.
You said that "someone went through profiles I've entered of relatives and did such things as ... marked my uncle as deceased." That can't really happen for a Living profile that you created. No one else could see your Living profile for your uncle, and they certainly could not mark that particular Living profile as deceased -- only you could do that. What you must have seen is that they marked their own Living profile for that uncle as Deceased (or created it as Deceased from the beginning). Then you could see that Deceased profile for your uncle and so you became aware that that record for your uncle had the incorrect status. But rest assured that this was not done to any Living profile that you created -- it was created by someone else.
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Just to emphasize what Alan explained: nobody besides you can go through and change what you've entered on living people, because the only way to even see any of that is to log in as you.
Of course, this doesn't stop other users from creating other profiles for the same people, and erroneously marking them as deceased. I've found that for recent activity, it's often faster to contact the user, via FS's internal messaging system. Once I point out that the person is still living, the profile often disappears from my view within a few hours. (The procedure involving FS staff can take a couple of days.)
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I do appreciate your answers neither however actually answers my question and both give me unnecessary explanations about how profiles work. Ive been doing this a long time, I know how it works, nor am I mistaken about the circumstances. anyway, thanx. I still havent heard back from any 'review' but Im sure site managers are busy folks.
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Since you state you know how profiles work which would mean that you understand that anyone can create a profile but no one can delete a profile unless the person is the creator and only contributor of that profile, I won't repeat the above explanations and instead focus on a statement you made that seems to be the source of the confusion.
Im asking because someone went through profiles Ive entered of relatives and ... marked my uncle as deceased and even had him buried. I was surprised to find I couldnt restore him to the land of the living 'toute suite', but must wait for someone to review the request.
If you entered your uncle as living, then what you stated here is impossible. No other user can see living profiles you have created or make any changes to them. Only the user who creates a living profile can go back and mark that profile as deceased, unless that user has granted helper permission to someone else.
I would suggest that you go to that uncle's Change Log and scroll to the very beginning of it. The very first entry will look like this:
Since the very first thing that happens is the creation of an ID for the profile no other information is seen in this entry. The next entry is usually "Name Added."
When you look at that uncle whose profile is marked at deceased, this entry is almost certainly not going to be you. Since you did not create the profile, you cannot "delete" the profile from the main body of the tree which is what marking someone as deceased essentially does. Only a Family Tree administrator can delete profiles whether the person in that profile was born in 2023, 1823, or is completely fictitious.
If the change log does show you created the profile in question for your uncle, please post the Person Added entry which will show your name and post the full history of changes in death status by filtering for that like this (but blocking out the person's name and ID number):
That will give the engineers evidence they need to see that you created the profile as living but someone else marked it as deceased which would mean that something has gone quite wrong.
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When you look at that uncle whose profile is marked at deceased, this entry is almost certainly not going to be you. Since you did not create the profile, you cannot "delete" the profile from the main body of the tree which is what marking someone as deceased essentially does. Only a Family Tree administrator can delete profiles whether the person in that profile was born in 2023, 1823, or is completely fictitious.
"...which is what marking someone as deceased essentially does."
I find this statement a bit confusing. The main body of Family Tree are all deceased. Why would marking a profile as deceased "delete the profile from the main body"? Then, yet having prior said - "...no one can delete a profile unless the person is the creator and only contributor of that profile." - the following statement: "Only a Family Tree administrator can delete profiles whether the person in that profile was born in 2023, 1823, or is completely fictitious." I am getting confused by the "delete" and Living/Deceased references I guess (perhaps that was the point of the comment).
In answer to the thread question - "[is it] counter-intuitive [that] we have to request to change a profile back to living?"
No. Since that PID was not created by us it is not.
You still see your Living profile at: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/contributions/private ?
If someone marked your Living profile deceased - then yes it would be counter-intuitive. And as Gordon mentions above - such should not have been done without your knowledge - and only a Helper that you authorized should have that sort of access to your account.
So yes it makes sense. What does not make sense is that anyone can mark a Living profile deceased without evidence (not sure if that has changed - but your question indicates otherwise).
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Whoops! Major slip of the tongue here. The sentence should have read: "Since you did not create the profile, you cannot "delete" the profile from the main body of the tree which is what marking someone as living essentially does."
Or to be a bit more wordy: "Since you did not create the profile which shows as deceased in Family Tree, you cannot "delete" that profile from the main body of Family Tree which is what changing a profile from deceased to living essentially does since it moves that profile from the main body of Family Tree to the private space of the person who originally created the profile where no other user can see it."
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