Listing possible living people as deceased

MStout3

• What are you trying to accomplish? To reduce the possibility of living persons as deceased.
• Why? to preserve living people privacy and ensure a small amount of accuracy.
• What is the challenge or roadblock you are encountering? Contributors are listing possible living persons as deceased without any source or comment.

What is your idea? Make the "Reason this information is correct" box mandatory to be filled in. Though this would not solve the problem it could reduce it. Perhaps having a pop up suggestion saying that "if this person is not 110 years old, please include a source for why this person is deceased." or just ask "Please tell us why you believe this person is deceased." To be on the easy side the box could accept any input so that if it is "personal knowledge" or some other non-specific thing, that would be acceptable. Greater than 110 years old would be acceptable. Any alpha-numeric characters would do, just not blank.

• How would solving this challenge improve your experience? United Stated Experience -Reduce the amount of searching for a death certificate, newspaper article, grave location, etc. in trying to verify this person's death. Granted, I still send off a chat request, e-mail if possible and phone call is really great but knowing that it is personal knowledge with even just a conjectured state or date, or place is a starting point. My specific case is a person who was born in 1940 but is listed as deceased with no explanation or source. Requiring a source, not matter how vague, is better than nothing.

Gordon Collett

Unfortunately, when adding a person to Family Tree through the Source Linker it is required to add a reason statement and this does not seem to slow people down at all. While working through a family, I found that the husband of one of the children and his three siblings were all created by the same user, were all well under 100 years old, were all marked deceased without a date, and were all given the same reason statement: idk.

I assume idk stands for "I don't know."

I would be in favor of requiring a death date with a tagged source and if those were blank automatically switching a deceased status to living upon saving the information.

ScottSeegmiller

@Gordon Collett I agree with your comment. However, I have noticed that in the new Source Linker, you can add a new person with no reason if they are marked deceased. I am not sure that this is intentional. Can you verify that this is how it works for you? I will then call it to the attention of the developers.

Gordon Collett

@ScottSeegmiller I haven't checked that out. In the old version, you did not need a reason statement if they were over 110 years old. But if the person was born less than 110 years ago and you tried to add them, you could not save unless a reasons statement such as "." was provided.

I'll head off to the 1950 census and see if I can find an example.

You are correct. The new source linker does not require a reason statement:

The Create New Person is active without a reason statement and when I clicked it, the person was created and marked deceased, then I immediately deleted the person.

In the old source linker:

The button is greyed out without a reason statement.

When you pass this on to the developers, please also mention that the warning statement in the new source linker:

Is rather useless compared to the old one. Although too many people probably just ignored the old one anyway.