Can my descendants see my FamilySearch profile (including the memories I uploaded) after I pass away

BrianMickelson

I've been putting some effort into adding a lot of memories (photos, audio, stories, etc.) to my own personal FamilySearch profile. I'm hoping that after I pass away, my grandchildren will be able to find my profile and see my stories and photos.

Will that happen? Will they people able to search for me in the FamilySearch database and find me and see everything that I've uploaded? If not, it seems like a waste of effort for me to add all of these personal memories.

Alan E. Brown

@BrianMickelson The answer depends greatly on whether you are a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

• If you are, then you will be happy to know that the profile you have worked on will indeed become public. See details in When a Church member dies, does the Church membership system update Family Tree?
• If you are not, I don't believe there is any mechanism for making your profile public, even though your account could be closed, as explained here: What happens to the accounts of deceased users?

Either way, there are some ways you can help such memories to survive your death. The easiest way I know of is to put all those memories in an album, and share a link to the album with one or more trusted friends or family members who you are confident will survive you. Then upon your death, they can create a public profile for you (connected with proper relationships to your deceased parents and perhaps a deceased spouse), and then tag all the memories in that album to that new public profile.

BrianMickelson

thank you so much. This is very helpful :)

Jeremiah Workman

Can anyone elaborate on whether this applies to not just our own profile, but possibly also profiles we created for individuals which are living? For example, if I create a profile for each of my living siblings that has tons of memories and documentation which I wanted to be saved for posterity, will these profiles go public later at some time even though my siblings are not church members??

Jordan5L

Hello @Jeremiah Workman !

I believe the policy @Alan E. Brown references still holds true even for other living profiles created other than your own.

Alan E. Brown

The only way a profile becomes public is for someone to mark it as deceased. That can happen in 4 ways, as far as I know:

• A Church member dies, the ward clerk marks the membership record as deceased, and the corresponding profile in Family Tree is marked deceased.
• A FamilySearch user marks a living profile as deceased.
• A FamilySearch user who is participating in Family Group Trees marks a living profile within the FGT as deceased.
• A FamilySearch data administrator marks a living profile as deceased (this is rare, but generally happens as a result of contacting Support).

For profiles you created for living persons, you would have to still be an active FamilySearch user and then mark a living profile as deceased. If these living people outlive you, there is currently no mechanism for those profiles being marked deceased; they will be hidden forever. There has been some talk of such profile being marked as deceased at some point (such as 125 years after their birth), but that has not been implemented.

If you participate in Family Group Trees, then it becomes much more likely that some member of the group will live long enough to mark a living profile on the FGT as deceased, so the work devoted to these living profiles is far less likely to be wasted. Indeed, this use case is the primary motivation for FGT.

Jeremiah Workman

@Alan E. Brown Thank you! I was not aware of the Family Group Trees feature. This is excellent, and ensures (or gives a much higher likelihood) that profiles won't go out of existence in the event the creator of Live person profile, ends up not outliving the profile they created. Thank you so much!

Jeremiah Workman

@Alan E. Brown It looks like the FGT thing is in beta or testing? Possibly not even availble anymore? There are instruction on this page for how to try it out, but when I follow the link, I can no longer "Try It"—it doesn't seem to be available in the Labs section

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/family-group-tree-pilot/article/frequently-asked-questions-about-family-group-trees

https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/

Alan E. Brown

FGT will be generally available fairly soon. I'm not sure why the experiment on Labs is no longer available — perhaps FamilySearch is not looking for any more testers at this point. But in any case, you will be able to use it to share living profiles when it becomes publicly available.