People from Palestine
My niece’s father has Palestinian origins. I found records on FamilyTree about her ancestors who lived in Bethlehem, Palestine, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. However, every time I indicated that one of her ancestors were born in Palestine, that person’s record automatically become confidential, even when he has been deceased for over 100 years. So all the records of people that I created who were born in Palestine, are not visible to other users. This creates duplicates.
I am assuming that all persons who created family trees with relatives born or deceased in Palestine also had all the members of that tree become “confidential”.
I found a duplicate, whose place of birth was not indicated. The one I had created indicated his birth date and place of birth, as Bethlehem, Palestine. When I attempted to merge the two, FamilySearch indicate that a confidential person could not be merged with a non confidential one.
This prevents other people from seeing those records, which defeats the purpose of FamilyTree. If that duplicate created by another user had correctly indicated the place of birth, it would not have been visible to me.
How can this issue be resolved ?
Answers
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I believe that the only way it can be actually resolved is for FamilySearch to do away with confidentiality. (I have yet to ever see a satisfactory explanation of just who they think they're protecting with it, and more to the point, from what exactly.)
Failing that, the best that users like you can do is to work around it: never put a place that's known to trigger the confidentiality bot in a field where the bot looks. Put "Bethlehem, Palestine" in the reason box.
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