Restricted countries?
I know profiles for several countries - primarily in the Middle East - are restricted in FamilySearch. Where can I find a list of which countries are restricted?
Answers
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I've seen such a list before. It was related more to doing Temple work; and not for doing genealogy sourcing/linking. In scouring through the current help articles I am not seeing a good article today.
Since the updated standards of https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/individuals-for-whom-i-can-request-temple-ordinances, I have not come accross such a restriction again.
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@Penny JoAnn B Johnson Can you explain what you mean by "restricted"? Are you perhaps referring to the habit that the Family Tree sometimes has of sometimes turning profiles from "Public Person" to "Confidential Person"? This can happen when the place name of a profile event is set to a place in one of a number of specific countries, including some Middle East countries. Only contributors to the can see (copies of) the profile.
There have been a number of discussions posted here about this behaviour, especially around the middle of 2024. If this is what you are meaning, you can use the community Search to find those discussions, and you can find information on the concept of "confidential" by using the Help dialog here in the community.
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@Penny JoAnn B Johnson - I have the distinct feeling that the logic that sets a profile as Confidential may be quite complex, which is not unreasonable given that any given profile will probably only have partial information. As an example, there were some profiles for people in the British Army who died during WW1 in the Gallipoli campaign. This is in what became Turkey and the problem profiles went confidential. However, there were still other British Army soldiers who died in the same place, at the same time, and they didn't go confidential.
I'm not sure if we ever got a clear explanation, though I think it was possible to retrieve the confidential profiles to be public again.
I appreciate it if you think that this is a bit more complicated than a simple list of countries, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that sometimes it really is more complicated.
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It might be for the best that FamilySearch does not openly publicise the names of these countries, as further questions could then follow and the end result might even lead to more countries being added to the list!
There should certainly be a process whereby a user could request a restricted profile should become public. Adrian's example probably illustrates a situation FamilySearch has not intentionally meant to create. I'm sure it would be difficult for a computer program to be set to include, say, British soldiers who died whilst on active service in a Middle East country, as opposed to an event involving a citizen of that country, whose details (even though deceased) might be deemed should be kept confidential as a safeguard to living relatives. In such cases, a human (FamilySearch employee) could review the specific example and possibly remove the restricted status of the profile.
As suggested, the issue is probably not so straightforward as it might appear, with FamilySearch sometimes choosing to apply a blanket restriction on the display of individuals / events relating to certain countries, but in other cases the restriction might be in place due to the country itself objecting to details of its citizens (even if deceased) being publicly available through Family Tree (or elsewhere).
I think we probably have to trust FamilySearch's judgement on this one: fine for us to suggest such a list should be made available, but accept there might be good reasons for them not being too open about the issue.
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I really appreciate your comments, everyone. I guess we shouldn't be concerned as individuals that we will accidentally add a restricted person to the Tree. FS will tag it and restrict it. I like Paul W.'s point: "It might be for the best that FamilySearch does not openly publicise the names of these countries, as further questions could then follow and the end result might even lead to more countries being added to the list!"
Thank you!
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@Penny JoAnn B Johnson In 2024, I was contacted by a user who was distinctly annoyed by this behaviour. About a quarter of her tree was Confidential because of the birthplaces of one of her grandfathers and many of his descendants. This was prior to the introduction of Family Groups, I think. She may now be using that to alleviate the situation. However, that doesn't allow for contact and collaboration with other contributors who may be unknowingly related to those in the family group.
There is a Help article (How do Family Tree profiles get marked as confidential?) which appears to describe the process.
- It claims that "Family Tree profiles get marked as confidential after a review by data administrators". That is at odds with my experience. The Confidential profiles that I have in my Person List were all marked as Confidential within a few seconds of my saving the problem location. Maybe "data administrator" doesn't refer to a human at all. If that is the case, the article should be amended to reflect this.
- It doesn't offer any method to appeal the confidentiality status.
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@JulianBrown38 - that's a useful summary. I would add, in response to your bullet point about how stuff gets marked as confidential, that it seems to me that there are possibly two sorts of confidential profiles.
One lot would be set as confidential after a review process as described. This is maybe used for historical figures. But... Historical figures are normally set to read only so I don't know of any instances of manually set confidential profiles.
The other lot gets set as confidential automatically, potentially within seconds of the trigger data being entered, when things like birthplaces are entered that sit in the restricted list.
I know of plenty of examples of automatic confidentiality profiles. I am unclear whether there are manually set confidential profiles - like you, I think that the article is at best misleading on this point.
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I can't see any point at all in setting a historical figure as confidential, they'd just get yet another duplicate very quickly, and anyway their information will be on Wikipedia etc. so what good would hiding it on FS do?
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@MandyShaw1 - I agree. I only wrote that bit about historical people because it matched the reference that Julian had found. Then halfway through I realised it made no sense because historical figures are read only in my experience. So I backtracked a bit to leave it as a discussion.
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