Creating a living profile makes the details unseeable (private) and locks-up that profile so only the creator can edit it.
It would make me sad if I locked-up someone's loved one and made them invisible.
In fact I could be so distressed that I mark the profile as deceased, so it would be visible and available for close relatives to edit.
Hypothetically speaking.
We have a living person, who is also entered as deceased. How to correct?
We have a living person, who is also entered as deceased. How to correct?
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Answers
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There is a very simple process: relevant Help Article.
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I think this question has been asked before, but I haven't done a deep-dive to find it, but how do we end up with living people entered as deceased?
I just checked my pulse, and the morse code that I can read from it indicates that I might still be alive, so hopefully I don't get misidentified as otherwise, no matter how boring I might be. 😁
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Many contributors have presumed that anyone listed in the 1940 or 1950 US censuses must be deceased. I'm not in the 1940, but I am a tiny baby in the 1950, and I can still find my pulse.
Also, some contributors add any survivor mentioned in an obituary without considering that they could be children, grandchildren or even great-grandchildren with long lives yet to live.
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I saw an obituary yesterday, in an official FS Collection of records from the last decade, that happily identified surviving family members in a full text transcription on the record itself ('indexed by a computer'). I continue to be shocked by FS' failure to set a good example concerning either privacy or data protection. Obituaries in the paper are, and always have been, a grey area in themselves (as someone said here recently), but they are made public for a particular purpose which is not genealogy.
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As for obituaries, if the data collection is separated, keeping the main subject of the obituary from the "survived by" section, then that should prevent the inclusion of the living.
If the obituary follows the 110 year idea, then everyone in it could be 99.99% assumed to be gone. Tiny babies that reach One Hundred and Eleventeen years old excluded.
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Unfortunately, volunteer projects appear to have made a significant contribution to the amount of individuals who have recently been added to Family Tree with a Deceased status, when they are very much alive. A couple of days ago I found individuals who had been added from a project on the 1931 Canada census, both born in the 1920s and with no evidence provided they had died. It did transpire both had died, but one individual only in late 2024. Regardless, I still don't understand FamilySearch's policy on privacy of the living, when the FS database includes many collections (particularly of births, obituaries and census records) where it is obvious many of those individuals will still be alive. Yet when it comes to Family Tree, we must not intentionally refer to the living, even though their names can be clearly seen in the Sources sections of their deceased relatives.
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Creating a living profile makes the details unseeable (private) and locks-up that profile so only the creator can edit it.
It would make me sad if I locked-up someone's loved one and made them invisible.
In fact I could be so distressed that I mark the profile as deceased, so it would be visible and available for close relatives to edit.
Hypothetically speaking.
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FamilySearch gives you a list of the people you have marked as Living (Family Tree > Private People). I go through my list periodically (the ones I don't know personally) and check to see if I can find evidence they are not living. That way no one is getting locked up. :)
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I thought this issue had been fixed safely by the introduction of Family Group Trees?
Personally I would never create a Living profile at all, that part of my tree sits in RootsMagic only (my children/grandchildren will be able to pick up the RM databases, or gedcoms thereof, after I die or if I lose capacity). Many of my family members' strong preference is for no-one to put their details, or those of their recently deceased relatives, on genealogical sites at all, whether or not they are publicly viewable.
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My additions to Family Tree seem very much in line with yours. I have not added my deceased parents, nor any of their (now all) deceased siblings. I just rechecked and found I have only three living individuals I have added to the Tree: all born in the early 1930s and who all have siblings / spouses who are deceased, and were born much earlier than they. I have thought about deleting their profiles, as it seems a bit hypocritical of me not to treat them like my own close relatives. I agree with you that the place for adding details of the living is on our personal software. Indeed, this was the attitude of a senior Family Tree manager when he advised (admittedly around ten years ago) that Family Tree was primarily designed to contain the details of deceased persons.
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My father is in FT because someone had added him with completely bonkers parentage (fixing which was my first ever contribution); and my 2 deceased siblings are not there. I did add my mother since her siblings were there (one of them only just deceased when I spotted her, she'd been added to the wrong parents, based on the 1939 Register and as Deceased, several years before her death). I thought it safest, once I had fixed my aunt, to add my mother correctly as well.
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This is high on my list of Things I Ought To Do But Never Seem To Get To.
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@MandyShaw1 I thought this issue had been fixed safely by the introduction of Family Group Trees?
I don't know things and had to look up Family Group Trees. Having looked that up I don't think I can make use of it for a couple of reasons.
One is I'm the only one in my family who does genealogy. Excepting a couple of cousins who did some work in Ancestry years back but have moved on.
I also have a sister I found on Ancestry. We're close now and talk all the time but she's also moved on from doing genealogy. My other sister has no computer or internet. Or car. Or TV except for shows on DVD.
Other reason is I work far afield. For example: My stepson of uncle of wife of brother-in-law of niece of husband of sister-in-law of sister-in-law of brother-in-law of sister-in-law of sister-in-law of sister-in-law of uncle of wife of brother-in-law of niece of husband of sister-in-law of sister-in-law of brother-in-law of my 1st cousin 2x removed. I would happily coordinate with their close kin on FamilySearch but I don't know who they are.
I appreciate the suggestion, nonetheless.
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@Paul W (to MandyShaw1) My additions to Family Tree seem very much in line with yours. I have not added my deceased parents, nor any of their (now all) deceased siblings.
I've withheld some close family too. I found my father's other offspring and got to know them well. I didn't add them or their maternal lines to FamilySearch because it isn't something that they would want right now.
For another sibling, we've earned some trust issues but do talk on occasion. It's possible their spouse could be uncomfortable with me researching their blood family. To handle that in advance, I volunteered that I wouldn't work on their family unless they indicated they were okay with it. By giving them that bit of control, I think I'm signaling respect and I'm hoping it'll help improve our relationship.
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@MandyShaw1 I continue to be shocked by FS' failure to set a good example concerning either privacy or data protection. Obituaries in the paper are, and always have been, a grey area in themselves (as someone said here recently), but they are made public for a particular purpose which is not genealogy.
With deserved kindness, I'd like to briefly+generally speak to this (data privacy).
I'm in FL which has had election roll data available for decades; it includes birth dates and addresses going back a few years. There's been some freakout about having this data available to the public but it hasn't led to a Parade of Horribles. Another testimony to the safety of public data: For generations, we all had phone books left on our doorsteps.
More importantly though, that data is a drop of what is trivially easy to buy for anyone who wants to spend a nickel for it.
Stated otherwise, locking away FL's election roll data away would prevent you and me from seeing it - but it will not (and does not) stop anyone who leverages our data against us.
This same thing goes for data we routinely see while we build out our family lines (like obituary details). I suggest we really don't want to restrict any of that info because those restrictions will only apply to us.
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I sincerely appreciate everyone's patience during my thread derailings.
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I get what you are saying, and electoral roll data is widely available in the UK too, but it doesn't expose family relationships beyond those living in the same house, and when you fill in the electoral roll form you are presumably warned that the data will not be kept private.
Newspaper obits are traditionally provided for the specific purpose of advising the local community in a timely and respectful manner of a death; as part of this, they traditionally include family relationship information in some detail. They are /not/ provided by families in order to make details of the family relationships of living people available on genealogical websites; doing so breaks the fundamental data protection principle of not reusing stored data for purposes other than the original one. The publication of obits for other than the original purpose would, I'd have thought, contravene EU GDPR legislation, and the corresponding UK law based on it, if any living individuals listed were protected by those laws. It's a grey area, I get that; everyone accepts their name and family relationships being shown in the newspaper in these situations, and they realise that newspaper articles and listings are in the public domain; but I can't see that they have consented to their information being republished in a different format for a different purpose without their knowledge.
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@MandyShaw1 I get what you are saying, and electoral roll data is widely available in the UK too, but it doesn't expose family relationships beyond those living in the same house
The roll data was just a placeholder for the larger point. When you restrict data from the public, you're only restricting yourself. The people who cause actual harm with data aren't affected at all.
Why restrict the public when no meaningful good comes from it? It's all downside, no up.
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That's an interesting take that I have not seen before.
My feeling is that information that is not published on the internet will be harder, much more expensive, and probably more illegal for bad actors to harvest. Though obviously that won't stop them if it is worth their while and if there is a vulnerability they can exploit, it does raise the bar.
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