Advertize the 110-year rule. Demonstrate good faith.

LegacyUser

Tom Alciere said: There is a lot of grumbling about living persons listed on FamilyTree as deceased. When I get bored sometimes I add local obituaries and I have found a few who were listed as deceased long before they were. There is also an independent Facebook page about FamilySearch (which is not connected to FamilySearch) and there is chatter about this problem. My suggestion is to pop up a warning (like when somebody makes a change without saying why) alerting the user to the 110-year rule, which they may not have been able to find. This way you would also demonstrate your good faith effort to protect privacy of living persons, something to tell those unhappy living persons complaining they were marked deceased. The rule is at https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I occasionally come across a person in Family Tree who is marked as deceased, but cannot locate any validating information.

In those cases, I use several websites to see if I can locate the individual.

When I do and discover they are not deceased, I correct the record and change it from deceased to living, attaching the reason for my action. In both of my recent cases, the record was made living, disappearing from FamilySearch FamilyTree.

There is nothing that can be done to stop people from entering the wrong data

Advertising isn't an answer because those notices are often ignored, or the information is coming from another site. In most cases, research will show why a user thought the person was deceased and part of it has to do with gravestones, where the etched in stone shows a birth date/year, but no death date/year.

But there is a way to correct the record, since it is part of the open-edit tree, which I have done.

But, one of the things that FamilySearch can do is to not accept "deceased" as a response when there is no date associated with it. Attempting to mark a record for a person who was born within the past 110 years as deceased should fail if there is no death entry.

LegacyUser

DougHo said: I could be wrong but I believe many of those people get added by users of Source Linker, such as family members listed in obituary and young people listed in more modern records such as 1940 census. That is the case for the majority of ones that I encounter, and I am usually unable to change them to Living without following the step to have it entered as a support case. That used to be more hassle, as I would feel compelled to try to "prove" that they were living such as finding an obituary listing them as living after the timestamp on patron's entry of deceased, and sometimes support would create a copy of the living person and put them in my private space which I didn't want (again, that happened more in the past, not recently).

Point is that Tom's suggestion about not accepting deceased needs to somehow have an exit path out of that portion of source linker adding, not just normal adding.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I agree, DougHo.

The source linker has (maybe had) some major problems, especially when adding new people to the tree. I think it was last year when I started a thread about some of the problems and they involved being able to update the person to be added flyout (which could not be done at that time).

It has been a while since I've used the source linker to add a person, so I don't know if that problem and others in other message threads have been resolved.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: The source linker already has a warning about not marking people as deceased when they are not.



The warning could stronger than "Add him or her as deceased only if you believe he or she is deceased." Maybe something along the lines of "Do not add him or her as deceased unless more than 120 years old without a source showing he or she is actually deceased."

Isn't the exit path out of that portion of the source linker just to not add possibly living people at all? There is no requirement to add everyone in the source. Leave living people unattached, close the window, and move on.