ID Conundrums
Greetings, my name is Benjamin J. I have been doing genealogy on FamilySearch for a while now since I’ve been called as a stake family history consultant a year and a half ago. Early in my research, I added a ton of living people(anyone after 1909)‘s ID’s until I realized how impractical it was. I now have over 1500 ID’s that I don’t want to mark as deceased because they most likely aren’t and I don’t want to risk ordinances being done on living people, but I don’t want to have to keep up with all of those living names. Some of them aren’t even family members as I was working all over in-law lines as well! Should I mark them as deceased anyway?
Which brings me to another problem. What if I died and still had private living ID’s on my account? What would happen to them? I know these are unusual questions, but I may never end up working with most of those living names again anyway and I don’t want to waste all those ID’s.
Answers
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you DONT have to "keep up with them"
you should NOT mark them deceased unless you know they are or if they were born greater than 100 years ago.
you dont really have to do anything - - -just ignore them if you wish.
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Thanks for the info! Much appreciated!
Benjamin
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but what was your original intent with inputting them in the first place?
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I’m sorry; I don’t think I was specific enough when I asked this question about why I was asking. I honestly didn’t know how to word my question at first. The reason why I added so many living people is because in my research, I wanted to add as many details and connections to various family lines as possible, but I got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with all those names until FS added the new My Contributions tab to the app. But I only add people who I know are deceased these days. I already knew concerning the 100 year rule, but there was something else I was confused about. As you know, when you add living people, only you can access them. But if/when you die or if your account somehow got deleted by accident, what would happen to the living ID’s? Is there a way for someone to access these ID’s if for some reason I could no longer access my account?
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1) Only you have access to the people in your private space.
2) Accounts do not get deleted
3) You should always have access to your account or be able to regain access.
4) You should consider giving your user id/password - only to a trusted close family member - in case anything happened to you.
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Thanks for the advice. I’ve been using FamilySearch for a little while now and have been trying to learn the more technical information about the nuances of how ID’s work because I’ve been dealing with a lot of duplicates lately.
I have one more advanced question about ID’s. If what I understand that once you merge someone into another ID of the same person, the merged person is deleted, but the ID is still used up on the duplicate. Is it possible to get the merged ID back? It’s probably an unnecessary question because there are lots of ID combinations, but do you think FamilySearch will eventually run out of ID’s. It seems to me that there are 36 to the 7 ID’s(A-Z and 0-10 per character and 7 characters) or about 78 billion ID’s. I know that’s probably more than the combined human population in history, but with there being lots of duplicates in existence, will we ever have to worry about that? I guess it’s more of a hypothetical question than a practical one, but it’s been on my mind for quite some time.
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to say that the original record is "deleted" is misleading
it is not really deleted - it is marked as deleted and in essence has been merged with the other record.
this is true because once you merge something - you actually can UNMERGE it - which means the record was never truly deleted. Just "marked" as deleted.
please don't be worrying about running out of ID's. Im sure we have probably used less .0001 percent of all possible ID's. Most of the people in pre-recorded history we have no record of any way. . .
your 1500 people are less than a spec of sand on the entire beach.
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Yeah, delete really isn’t the right word, isn’t it? I guess technically you could delete a person by clicking Delete Person, which I’ve never done and have no intention on doing so I don’t know if that gets rid of an ID or not. That answers all of my questions. Thank you so much!
Sincerely,
Benjamin J
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