Family Influences

LegacyUser

Unowho said: My idea is for a Family History Activity. I it is closely related to the Family Traditions. I call it Family Influences. Examples: My dad influenced his father and brothers to become small aircraft pilots. My husband's grandfather was a proud Vet. This influenced his sons to join the military. My mom's grandmother taught her and her sisters to crochet.

Each example has a one page wirte up showing the influential person at the top, with each person they influenced and what they did. For example: Grandmother at the top.a picture of each grandaughter and an item they crocheted with one paragraph about their crocheting.

The activity has bought our famly closer together as we contact others to learn of how they were influrenced by another family member.

The pages are very heartwarming. Let me know if you would like to see an example.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community support 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.

This is what the stories section of memories is all about. One should be aware that those who followed their family influences actually recognized what they had done and acknowledged the person in some kind of document. Otherwise, it may have been a matter of learning and/or tradition, especially back fifty or more years ago.

Unfortunately, FamilySearch FamilyTree is not ideal for recording this kind of information, despite claims to the contrary. Increased privacy laws, such as the GDPR in the European Union, along with increased vigilance in Germany, may preclude any publishing public acknowledgements by living persons.

So where should this kind of wonderful information be published? Privately, certainly, and shared with those of the family. Privacy laws can be troublesome and because FamilySearch is international in nature and is actually "FamilySearch International," those laws impact what is possible with FamilySearch.

Currently, FS is looking into the restrictive privacy laws and we have been told that they hope to be able to allow others access to living persons' records. How that will work or what that will involve -- I think those are things that will determine if such access will be possible.

I noticed that you had previously posted a thread that no one responded to. https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea..., "A Prompt to Change Living to Dead 110 years after the birth date."

While I'm surprised that no one responded, previous suggestions along these lines have been met with resistance. Why? Because we need to validate that a person has actually died. There are currently a number of living people, whose age has been validated to be more than 110 years old.

What has been mentioned in the past is that FS is considering running a routine to make some changes to persons who are recorded in private spaces. But as to anything automated with respect to 110 years... I don't know and have my doubts.

LegacyUser

Christine said: Oooo. I love this idea. I wonder if the FamilyHistory Guide would love this suggestion. Check their website for suggested activities. I also think it is a great idea to add to familysearch's family history activities. Those activities are ideas for living family members, and so they may want to add the suggestion to some of their activities. I do not add anything to living people to the family search site because of privacy concerns, but these pages could be done privately or on a familywebsite or private facebook page.

LegacyUser

Unowho said: Thanks for your response and for the information. Luckily the family influences I added to memories were for deceased persons. I'll have to hold off on others that have living persons in them.

The Living to deceased suggestion was for a prompt for a FamilySearch user to check the date. Not that the date should be researched or changed by FamilySearch.

As I noted in my suggestion:

"This could be a Research Hint or an Email reminder that a family member has passed the age of 110 years and could be deceased.

This will also act as a prompt to find the possible death date and add it to the person page."

LegacyUser

Unowho said: I guess I made my suggestion in the wrong area. Sorry about that.

LegacyUser

Christine said: Oh no! Not wrong place at all! I was just suggesting another place that has fun family history activities! I think it is a fabulous idea and sounds like a lot of fun and a great way to link family members together in love.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Definitely not the wrong place. I was surprised when your other idea didn't receive any responses, which is why I brought it up here.

LegacyUser

Ron Tanner said: I probably need to clarify what is expected with GDPR. When a person makes a GDPR claim what they are asking about what the system has recorded about the actual person who is making the claim. It is not asking about living relatives or memories. Only what we have recorded about the individual. Any user can remove their memories or living persons manually. And the approach we are taking for sharing of living we foresee to be appropriate to proceed within the GDPR and other privacy guidelines.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Thanks for the update on what is being worked on with respect to the GDPR.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Yep. The formal name for this GDPR process is a Subject Access Request (at least in the UK). Basically it says to the data controller (Familysearch in this case) that they must provide all of the information held about the data subject (the person making the SAR) to the data subject within the specified time limit, suitably redacted so that no one else's personal data is leaked.

LegacyUser

Beth Ann Wiseman said: I love this post about Family Influences.

I work on the Memories team at FamilySearch and just recently we released topic tags for memories. I liked this idea so much that I have started (ok, it’s just one story now – but I have a few others in mind) using the topic tag “Influencers” to mark stories like this. If I (or my extended family) search for topic tags within close relatives, we will find the influencers in our family.

Thank you so much for sharing this idea.

LegacyUser

Unowho said: I like your idea too!

I went to my Family Influence page and tagged it as an Infuencer. Right away it showed me another Memory that was tagged as an influencer. I was able to learn about a distant cousin that was influencd by her grandmother's request to pray for her. I was very touched.

Thank you for bringing this idea to life. You're the best!