Person listed in my tree as Confidential but perhaps should not be
Hi, I'm interested in getting person PMGN-FZB to be "de-confidentialized" along with all his siblings. The person of interest is my grandfather, deceased in 1986 and documented in the sources. I'm not sure how that happened, perhaps because I requested my mother (His daughter) be changed from deceased to living last year, but that should not affect her father and uncles. Indeed, on her mother's side, her mother and all her aunts and uncles are not "confidential"; they remain fully visible.
Is there someone I should write to who can authorize that change? This entire branch of my family tree is very important to me (Assyrian Christians of the Assyrian Church of the East, very hard to find old records for).
Thanks
Best Answers
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You'll find many threads on this subject here in Community. I don't get the impression FS are prepared to do anything at all about this.
One suggestion I made a while ago (don't know if it worked, though) was to use RootsMagic or a similar partner solution: import the offending profiles from FT, create a gedcom from the resulting data, edit the nasties out of the gedcom via e.g. Notepad, and then upload the resulting clean gedcom into FT.
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@Jonico61 If your goal is to share your research with your family, you can use the new family group trees to share your research on confidential profiles with your family. The profiles created there will be visible to other family members who have joined the group. Family groups can have up to 500 members of the group. A family group tree can have any number of profiles in it.
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Similar reports - relating to profiles that include details mentioning events that took place in the Middle East - have been regularly reported here for many years. The issue appears to involve the sensitivity relating to the region. However, it has never been explained why entering details that relate to individuals that have long since deceased should affect the safety of anyone alive today.
One suggestion is to remove all references to the country / region concerned from the Profile / Details page, in order that at least the dates can be displayed, the places being advised through attached documentation and notes away from that main page. At least this should make such profiles open for public viewing.
However, you must take into consideration that FamilySearch's Family Tree (with the exception of a small amount of countries) can be viewed worldwide, so do be careful about any data you add that might be regarded as "sensitive", especially when relating to recently deceased individuals, who might easily be connected to living persons.
I will leave it to someone else (perhaps a site moderator) to advise you of any steps you can take in getting your specific problem to be reviewed by FamilySearch.
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Thanks Paul W. I have removed all profile details with references specifically to their Middle East origins as you suggest, in the hope that it changes something. I'm also hoping a site moderator or such might offer some insight here, since I haven't been able to find anything further in the help section.
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Good morning. Please go to the website listed on the bottom of the FamilySearch web sites showing Contact US…. They will everything in their power to assist you with your troubles with your family line in FamilySearch.
It also could be as simple as this:
If you see someone who should not be in your Private People list in Family Tree, you can remove the record:
- Add the person's death or burial information to the record in Family Tree. This moves the record from your private tree to the public Family Tree.
- Delete the person from your private tree or your family group tree.
Copying living or confidential people from your private list to a family group tree does not automatically delete them from your private list. After copying living or confidential people to a family group tree, you can choose whether to keep the copies in your private tree.
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@Jonico61, @Paul W, excluding all mention of the sensitive places (in the place fields) has its attractions in the short term, but there is another difficulty that can arise. At some point, another user may well "discover" the actual place and innocently enter it. Suppose that the actual place had previously been entered in some data item where the bot hopefully won't find it (as suggested in this and other discussions) and even that a previous user had placed an alert note on the profile asking users not too update the place (as has also been suggested in another discussion). If one user updates the place, innocently or willfully, the profile can be marked as Confidential and become lost to the public domain.
Some months ago, I was looking at a family where all the children had death dates and places except for one male. I decided to follow that up, and found that the man had died at Gallipoli c 1915 (from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and FindAGrave, I think). I entered that information. At that time, I was well aware of the confidentiality issue. However, I didn't know that Turkey was on the list of sensitive places. What I do know is that there are many, many soldiers who died in similar circumstances whose profiles are still public. A short time later, I went back to find this soldier's profile; I probably used my Recents list. FamilySearch reported that it could not find the profile. Eventually, I found that I had a completely new confidential profile in my Private People list. It had clearly been cloned from the original profile but all the data items were marked with my user id as the last updater. I suppose that the original profile is now languishing in the Private People list of the original creator. I don't if there were other users who contributed to the original profile which I can no longer see; if there were, maybe they also now have unexpected confidential clones.
In another case, I added three children to a family based on their appearance in the "England and Wales, Census, 1881" collection. Their birthplaces are recorded as "Constantinople, Turkey" and they were born in the 1870s. Their profiles duly became confidential. The standardized place for this is "İstanbul, Ottoman Empire".
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So thanks, everyone. I've read your ideas and then spent several hours first deleting any reference to anywhere in the Middle East on each person's profile details in the general Family Tree. And in my specific family group tree. Nothing changed. So I deleted each and every person, and then created new ones, and sure enough, they appear normal, but as @JulianBrown38 points out, it will last only until someone unwittingly adds the Place of Birth info (I did that to one and immediately it changed back to Confidential, so I see the bot is very very active).
It feels unfair enough to warrant some detailed explanation from FamilySearch on why the bot is doing this to the Middle East, even the Ottoman Empire which hasn't existed in over 100 years. Maybe there is such an explanation but I haven't found it yet.
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Thanks for the tip, that's the goal I have in mind. I've got a family group tree up and running and will try to share it with some family members. I didn't realize they would also be able to see all the confidential people, so that takes away that problem. If I add place of birth info on a profile in my family group tree, I wonder if it will make the equivalent private Family Tree profile go confidential. We shall see!
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Yes, if the profile is a deceased individual in the FamilySearch Tree it will turn confidential. You may need to recreate that person in your family group tree in order to share with your family.
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