Helping increase family tree

LegacyUser

Joelson da Silva said: Imagine that my father had built another family and, consequently another family group, and I would like to connect the relation he had with the other family in my family tree. Then, I have my tree built and the e-mail of my sister on the part of my father and I would like her to insert the information of her family side, Then why can't I click on my father's name and send an e-mail to a "contributor" (the sister in this case) who would be able to see my family tree and insert more information?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

You can do whatever you want with your family tree, but it will not be on FamilySearch. FamilySearch FamilyTree is a single tree for all of humanity. We often see the confusion of "my" family tree and the massive tree (with over 1.2 Billion profiles) that makes up FamilySearch FamilyTree.

Living people are stored in a user "private space", which can only been seen by the user who created those profiles of Living Persons. Once a person is marked deceased (with a death date and/or place and a source), it moves from the user's private area into the public tree of deceased persons.

If your father is still living and you did not create an entry for him, you will not see him in your view of the tree. Laws of Privacy prohibit this. Family Search is working to see if they can create a means by which living people can be shared between a limited number of users without violating the laws regarding privacy. Right now, the feature has not been released. We do not know when or if such a feature will be released into production.

You can certainly have ancestral lines and their descendants, but the tree design is that there should be only one profile for each person that is no longer living. That means that any duplicate entries needed to be merged together.

If you are unfamiliar with how to do this, then you may want to explore The Family History Guide, which is an online (http://thefhguide.com/) and approved training guide for not only FamilySearch, but also for several other sites, including Ancestry.

The owners of the guide do their best to keep up with the latest changes, but since FamilySearch is still being developed, they sometimes can lag behind the changes.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Are you talking about living or deceased people? That little detail makes a huge difference in how the profiles are set up and who can see them.

For deceased people, there is no "your tree" and "her tree" on FamilySearch: it's all one tree, with the goal of having one -- and only one -- profile for each person who has ever lived. So if your father is deceased, then both you and your sister should be working on the same profile, with the same profile ID. If you have entered separate copies of his profile, you should merge them; properly done, this will bring all of the details of both families together onto one profile page.

If your father is living, then there is currently no way to combine his profiles. Only the person who created a living person's profile can see that profile; it only exists in that one user's private space. You need to "connect" with your sister's work at a further remove, with your nearest deceased relatives.

LegacyUser

Joelson da Silva said: Thanks for your reply.

I understand that once my father is deceased, my sister on his part and I should be using the same profile, which is not the case. My suggestion was that she could (with my permission) see my tree and include more information based on the father we had in common, but I understood now that for privacy law reasons this is not possible.

Thank you for your help.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Don't give up. This is something that FamilySearch is working toward. We don't have any dates and last I heard (from a FS employee) is that the legal issue has been resolved, but there are other, underlying issues at hand that have to be resolved.

FS doesn't provide targeted release dates because the complexity of the site has a way of coming up with something that will add a delay to the planned release of a feature.