After my death, can my children access my account if I give them permission/password?
I am a member of the church. No other persons in my family are members.
Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time & energy uploading photos, stories, and other memories. After reading various articles from FamilySearch (FS), I am confused about what I can do to easily transfer and/or give my daughter access...
I serve in the Stake FamilySearch Center, and there is confusion, and sometimes contradictory information being disseminated to others about this topic.
Question #1: If I give her my daughter my FS user's name and password while I'm still living, will she be able to log-in, see the photos, and read the stories in Memories (after the Ward Clerk enters my date of death on my membership record)?
Question #2: If I create a non-member account for my daughter, will she be able to transfer the Family Tree, photos, and stories from my account to hers? Before I die? After I die?
Answers
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The short answer is no. See: Deceased user accounts • FamilySearch
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The position is not totally bleak.
As Aine says, your account will be closed following your death but there are some actions you can take.
- Set up an account for your daughter as you suggest. You can be added as a living person in her account. That record will be private to that account at this stage. Following your death, she can mark that record as deceased and merge it with the record of you in your tree (which is now visible following your death). You might want to give her instructions how to do this. That will make your tree visible to her.
- Make sure that all your memories are attached to people in your tree. Also make sure that none of the memories are marked as private. That way she can see them via looking at the memories attached to your ancestors.
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Following your death, she can mark that record as deceased and merge it with the record of you in your tree (which is now visible following your death). You might want to give her instructions how to do this. That will make your tree visible to her.
Unfortunately, you have not made the position clear with regards to the profiles for "Living" persons. His daughter will still be unable to see these, so (as discussed under another recent topic) surely the effort involved in that "Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time & energy uploading photos, stories, and other memories", will have been wasted if this has related to living relatives, as well as those deceased?
Obviously, the proviso here relates to how FamilySearch's "Family Groups" plan - due to be introduced later this year - will alter the current situation.
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@Paul W I think you missed the part where the poster said he would give his daughter his log in credentials. In that case she WILL have access to his living profile he created as well as his living profile she created. She will then be able to mark both deceased (when that unfortunate time comes) and will be able to merge them.
@Michael Bright1 I would seriously advise you to stop your work on living people IN FamilySearch. Keep it all offline. If I were you and had all those photos and stories in memories of living people, I would start deleting them from FamilySearch and sending them to your daughter offline.
I doubt very seriously that I will have anyone interested in my log in credentials, and thus I have not even created many living profiles of my living relatives and have certainly created NO memories or added any sources to them. I have only created person pages of living family and extended family who want me to work on their family history. They have a profile photo I grabbed from their Facebook account so that they can see themselves in screenshots of lineages or when I do a screen share during an online meeting.
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There is no "one size fits all" answer to your question, but there are some simple steps you can take now to help ensure your daughter will be able to view the memories you have uploaded to FamilySearch.
If you prepare now, you can easily share your memories with your daughter now—she doesn’t need to wait until you die. (This does not include your own vital information & relationships to other persons.)
- Unless you mark a memory as private it is visible to anyone who has the URL—whether or not the memory is tagged to a living person. An account is not needed to view the memory or to share the url with others.
- You may have uploaded memories that you tagged to your own ID, some you tagged to your daughter or other living IDs that only you can see, and some memories you tagged to IDs of deceased persons who are viewable by anyone signed in with FamilySearch account.
- The memories Gallery view shows all the memories you uploaded, albums you created, and memories you bookmarked.
- When an account is locked because the user dies or the accountholder deletes his accounts the "gallery" as a whole is no longer accessible to anyone.
- However other uses can still view individual memories or albums with the URL or by using "find" in memories to locate some or all of the memories.
- The memories Gallery view shows all the memories you uploaded, albums you created, and memories you bookmarked.
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@Michael Bright1, @Gail Swihart Watson's advice about login credentials only applies to public accounts like hers and mine. LDS accounts like yours are closed and become inaccessible once your church membership record is marked as "deceased".
Given this fact, I agree with Gail and strongly urge you not to use your private space on FS for anything other than what it's meant for: a means of connecting you to your deceased relatives. Nobody but you will ever see any profile that you enter as "living", or any memory that you mark "private", unless you change that setting, so there's no point to investing any time in your private space. Keep track of living family and current events somewhere offline. (After all, the best and easiest way to protect private data online is to not put it online in the first place.)
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As Julia has confirmed, my response was based on Michael advising he was a member of the Church and my knowing this would mean his account would be closed immediately upon his demise.
However, I have to acknowledge he did say,
".. will she be able to transfer the Family Tree, photos, and stories from my account to hers? Before I die? After I die?" (My emphasis in the bold type).
So, yes, by providing her with his credentials, the daughter could work on the profiles for the "Living" IDs, whilst he is still alive.
Apart from that, I believe we can all agree on the very limited use of adding lots of information to profiles of IDs created in Family Tree for the living.
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This help article might be worth reading: Do not allow others to use my username and password • FamilySearch
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I think you misunderstood my plan. I confess I did not spell it out in detail.
- Daughter creates an account (or the father creates it on her behalf as long as she knows how to access it).
- Daughter adds a record of her father. As he is still living, this is only visible to her. She need go no further at this stage.
- On father's death, as he is a Church member, on notification, the Church marks his Church membership record as deceased.
- This will lead to his FamilySearch member account being closed and the record of himself now becomes visible. This record remains connected to all his ancestors.
- Daughter marks her version of her father's record as deceased.
- She now merges her version with her father's original record, the latter being attached to the rest of his tree.
- She can now easily see the tree and any memories attached to any of her ancestors.
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@Graham Buckell, I believe your steps 3 to 7 are largely unnecessary. Michael's daughter can connect her version of his profile to those same deceased relatives while he's still living. In fact, that's kind of the whole point of even having profiles for living people: they serve as connectors between accountholders and the public Tree.
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@Graham Buckell , the record that is created by the Church when the father dies is not a copy of his Living record that he created with all the photos, memories, stories etc that he had attached to his own Living PID. The newly created record has the bare information about his dob & dod and maybe a few relationships to deceased parents or siblings.
Now, there may be a way in the future, where you may be able to join that Living PID into a Family Group, then in theory after your death, someone else in that Family Group may be able to mark that PID deceased. Don't know.
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That may or may not be true. In many cases, the person record that the deceased person worked on for their self in Family Tree while they were alive may very well be marked as deceased by FamilySearch when their death is recorded. Then all their attached memories, facts, events, relationships to deceased persons, etc. will all become visible. The key to whether that happens is if their person record was created from their membership record, and that will happen only if their membership record number was supplied when their FamilySearch account was initially created. If their membership record number was attached after the FamilySearch account was created, then I don't think this will happen.
Here's a specific example that demonstrates that this is true: I have a cousin who died in 2022. His now-visible record is clearly the one created at the time Family Tree was created (in 2012). It has a memory created in 2019 where he was the then-living contributor. The change log for his person shows that he personally attached that memory in 2019. The change log also shows that he made updates to at least one Note in 2020 and the Brief Life History in 2017. Also, his Person ID is one that starts with KW, which is another indication that it was created from membership records back in 2012. All this makes it clear that we are seeing the person record that he worked on while he was alive that was then marked as deceased when his death was recorded by his ward clerk.
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@Michael Bright1, this article my be of some help. #1056 4Aug2022
What happens to memories after the contributor dies?
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