Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine: Is there a way to relax the "Private Person" Rule to 110 years?
Hi,
All my ancestors from my dad's side, past my great grandparents, are from Bethlehem, Palestine. They were born there, they got married there, they died there. For generations and generations.
I have the Church of the Nativity records and I have a project where I want to add the entirety of the records to FamilySearch, so that many of us in the Palestinian Diaspora, 2 million or so of us, can know their relatives.
Most of our ancestors came to the Americas before the 1920's… so my grandparents and afterwards were born in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Chile, USA, etc…
The problem I've been having is that I discovered that FamilySearch automatically puts the people as "private", almost identical to if the person were alive, invisible other than to me and perhaps one or two more people on FamilySearch, if I put that the person was:
Born
Got Married on
Died
In Bethlehem, Palestine. And this occurs even for ancestors born in the 1600's!
In fact, it doesn't matter the date. As soon as you put Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, in any of those fields, the person becomes private.
So after a lot of work, I am talking a few 8 hour days, of inputting data, for example, of all the Handal family tree, a 60 page document with easily 1000 people…
Someone comes in and sees that there is no birth/death/marriage place and starts putting "Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine" to as many as that person can… ruining all that work, because now only myself and that person can see that work.
I would like to implore the admins in the FamilySearch website to please change the rule and make it so that people who were born more than 110 years ago are exempt from this rule. I understand that the rule is meant to protect people currently living in Palestine, but I highly doubt that knowing my 12th level great grandpa from the 1600's will put myself or anyone in Palestine at risk.
Thank you.
Answers
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1600s? Wow, I didn't know that the confidentiality bot was that dumb!
I still haven't ever gotten any answer to who FS thinks this policy is protecting and from what exactly. I mean, the Tree is open-edit: people can — and do — edit profiles for people who have absolutely no relationship to them, so encountering a user's contributions on a profile tells you only that the user contributed to that profile. This means that even if someone worked on a recent Middle Eastern family, this tells other users of FS exactly nothing about that user, beyond what the user chooses to share publicly in his or her profile. This means that the people being protected must be some group other than users of FS, and that's where I come to a full stop: I cannot figure out any way to connect the Tree data to non-public figures, anywhere in the world, and also cannot find anything in the Tree that could possibly do any harm to anyone anywhere. How can knowing the birthplace of a deceased person harm anyone?
@Rene3075, perhaps it would speed up response to your plea to flag your post for moderator attention, and to use the word "confidential", as I believe that's the label applied to these profiles.
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As far as I know, that's not subject to a 110-year rule. At issue is the location, not the dates/ages.
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According to a few Help Center articles, it's a 150-year rule, but by all accounts, it's purely theoretical. The actual time limit is random, with an upper limit of infinity.
This article suggests contacting Support directly about confidential profile questions: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/are-the-confidential-people-in-my-family-tree-private-space-ever-made-public.
And there are a couple of articles (https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/living-and-confidential-people-in-family-tree and https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/deceased-people-in-my-family-tree-private-space) that indicate "Administrators mark records as confidential if the ability for the public to view the information could harm the contributor", which contradicts my logical deductions and makes absolutely no sense to me.
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Thank you!
How do I flag my post?
How do I make the administrators see my post?
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I had the same problem with a ancestor born in Egypt: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/GYBK-X1W
He lived his life in Germany and The Netherlands, married a Dutch woman and died there. After a very unsatisfying correspondence with European Support and without any reasonable explanation from their side, I ended up deleting the original entry. Then created him new without the Birthplace and made a alert note with his Birthplace and saying not to add it.
I too, still don't see the need for this restriction.
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Hi Lars, I wish it was only one ancestor that had this issue. It's hundreds, to undo the damage would take a very long time!!
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Does reverting the 'bad' change from the changelog fix the profile, or is it permanently stuck on confidential? If the latter, then maybe FS would be receptive to changing the logic (as opposed to the existing data).
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@MandyShaw1 Deleting the problematic places doesn't change the confidential status. Nor can you create a new non-confidential profile and try to merge the confidential one into it (to save having to re-enter all the stuff on the confidential profile); you don't even get to start the merge. Been there, done that.
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Maybe this is one place where a gedcom export, remove all references to Bethlehem, and then re-import to FT could be helpful - if you were prepared to ignore the parallel 'confidential' versions of the profiles (though I'm assuming third party products such as RootsMagic can pick up confidential profiles if the creating FS user is used for the connection - this may not be the case, I suppose).
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I note that the profile for Jesus Christ (or a profile) has "Bethlehem of Judea" as His birthplace, which is recorded as a non-standardised place. I presume this must mean that the standardised value is totally empty - I can't click on the pencil to check because the profile is read-only.
If you knew how to set that up, it might help??? Maybe?
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I have acquired a number of confidential profiles, including some with birth and death places in Israel and Turkey.
In one case, I was attaching a source from the England and Wales Census, 1881. There were three children, all born in Constantinople (or Istanbul, as FamilySearch likes to standardize it). The parents' profiles had already been created in 2012, as had profiles for two other children who were born after 1881. The three profiles which I created for the children became confidential. Shortly afterwards, I found and attached a marriage source for the parents in England Marriages, 1538-1973. They had married in 1873 at the British Embassy in Constantinople. Entering that marriage did not affect the public status of the parents.
Over time, I have been able to enter death or birth places in these geographical areas for dozens of individuals. Not surprisingly, the only cases where the profile became confidential were those that I had created. Profiles that other users had created remained public.
Perhaps this suggests a way to avoid this behaviour.
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I've had the same issue before, as well. My grandfather was Palestinian (our family was originally from Beit Jala, so right next to yours!).
I've emailed support and suggested that this is unnecessarily punitive to people of Middle Eastern descent, for whom research is already challenging enough. Unfortunately, they seem to be unmovable on this topic.
So far, my workaround is leaving the place of birth empty and putting a note in the "reason this information is correct" area saying something like, "Birthplace is Beit Jala, Palestine; do not enter in birthplace field or FamilySearch will privatize this individual."
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