Auto Follow Deceased Persons When creating them
I am entering a lot of names of my family. They are Greek Names and the reason why I must follow them all is because others will unknowingly merge Greek names thinking they are the same person. The reason this mistake is very common is in the way Greeks name their decedents.>
Many Greeks have the "exact same name", and it is traditional to name the first born after the paternal fathers father, and the second after the paternal mothers father. Then alternating with subsequent children. Therefore names repeat often and people go in and merge grandfather to son thinking it is the same. This happens more often if I have not entered or estimated the birth date or added sources.
Also: In Greece when a child dies at or around birth, and was given a name ie."John". It is very likely that the family will name the next successfully born son John as well. So when you see 2 or 3 of the same name in a Greek family, they most likely had children that died before and named them all the same name. Other think they need to be merged and this is a big mistake.
Now you see why I must follow every name I have created.
It is a problem and I would like to auto follow anyone I create so I can check weekly changes and undo merges by others that do not read or understand Greek.
Request: Can My account auto follow anyone I create. Please?
Comments
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This problem arises for those following English ancestors, too. Any "auto follow" feature might soon push the number of individuals being followed to over the 4,000 maximum each user is allowed to have on their "Following" list. Presumably this is one reason FamilySearch will be unlikely to implement this suggestion.
Surely, if you know of this problem in advance, you should always manually add such individuals to your Following list as you create / work on them?
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I agree with Paul on all counts: one, auto-follow would cause lists to overflow and make life difficult, and two, nothing about the name-duplication problem is uniquely Greek. I have relatives who had seven daughters with a total of two names, and three relatives who married women with exactly the same name as their mothers -- and two of those relatives had the same name as their fathers. (My ancestors all lived in Hungary.)
Given that you can follow a profile without ever actually going to the profile page, I really don't think auto-follow is at all necessary or desirable. If you've just added a bunch of offspring to a set of parents, go to one of the parents, scroll down to Family Members, click the name of the first child, click the star, click the name of the next child, click the star, and so on. Even in a family of fourteen, it'll take less than a minute total to follow every child.
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Names work just the same in all of Scandinavia in naming children after their grandparents and in naming children after deceased siblings. So this is a common problem throughout cultures.
Fortunately when merging there are warnings such as "these two people were born 50 years apart" that should prevent grandfathers and grandsons being merged. Fully documenting the person, adding sources, and adding any needed notes also helps. As does continually teaching people that names are never sufficient to identify a person and seeing two people of the same name does not mean they are the same person.
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