Why did FamilySearch create a duplicate of one of my relatives last month?

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: This duplicate profile just has the correct birthdate and was created by FamilySearch last month. Why?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I would like to know that as well!

This record was created by FamilySearch exactly 2 days* after that person's 110th birthday. I really hope that they are not experimenting with automatically manipulating records reaching the 110th year rule for "auto-deceasing" records or some such in the production database.

*Even though it shows 3 days difference in the image Jordi provided in the original Topic post (which appears to have come from a mobil device), it does not match those exact same events as shown from a desktop:

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Hmm. So where is the traceability?

LegacyUser

Paul said: Some years ago there were arguments on this forum about the practice of "FamilySearch" adding records. The general consensus was that the name of the specific section (e.g. Support) should be included and reason statements added, where appropriate.

This practice certainly does not seem to conform to the standards expected of ordinary users.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Plus the consensus from all GetSat users was that this sort of thing hadn't happened since the extraction programmes populated stuff which became the IGI.

Yeah. Sure.... At least we have an example now (thanks Jordi!) that can't be dismissed as the last phases of integrating New FamilySearch.... Can it?

LegacyUser

Don M Thomas said: With as large as FamilySearch has become over the years, it should be necessary, that FamilySearch add an employee or missionary or departmental name to its user name.

FamilySearch by (employee name, or missionary name, or departmental name).

Jordi Kloosterboer, I doubt that you will every get an answer to your Feedback question.

LegacyUser

Lyle Toronto said: Way back in the day they would create people from record collections, but I don't think they have done this for years now.

Any new persons are usually created from a church membership record. For instance if a member of the church logs in for the first time it will auto populate their tree from church membership records (including living persons). These people that are auto populated have special metadata on them (that doesn't display in the UI). They use this special metadata to match and not create duplicates.

In the past they used to push updates to these records that came from church membership. I had friends who would have update battles with the system, because someone else had "body snatched" these system created records and made it represent a completely different person.

I also remember Ron Tanner talking about marking a person deceased if the membership record had been marked deceased for a period of time. It was part of the resolution on private spaces.

I hope some of these tidbits of random info help.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: The person was not a member of the church. Also, if a person created the person as living, it would have that info in the changelog representing them and not FamilySearch I would think, but I am not sure about that.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I had hoped that Lyle was onto something but it seems unlikely - or at least, not directly so.

I really, really would like FamilySearch to respond to this, because we have a profile with no sources, zero traceability and in defiance of what I thought (possibly erroneously!) was today's customs and processes. Apparently under FS's own name?

LegacyUser

Paul said: We are advised (realistically) that a FamilySearch employee cannot answer every query raised here, but this is one that surely has to be addressed.

There is much criticism of users who raise duplicates and/or create profiles without any reason statement or sources, yet "FamilySearch" appears to be doing precisely that here.

I'm sure most users would like to be assured that there is some "audit trail" regarding such work by FamilySearch employees and have confirmation the practice of an employee being able to record just "FamilySearch" (without any qualification of which section, etc.) will be discontinued.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Re the identity FamilySearch as used on updates.

To clarify my own personal view on this, and speaking as someone who ran a support team, I am not asking for specific user IDs for updates like this. There is a great difference between an employee of FamilySearch doing an update as part of their job; an employee of FamilySearch responding in forums like this as an informed user; and an employee of FamilySearch entering data into the tree as part of their own genealogical practices.

In the last case, it is entirely appropriate for them post / enter data under their own name with no mention of FS.

In the middle case, a user ID that is a composite of their own name plus "FamilySearch employee" or similar is sensible - exactly what Joe and the other guys who post here do. (There are probably all sorts of variations of the degree to which those guys speak on behalf of FS. That's fine)

In the first case, there is no way that we should be expecting an identity that has a person's name - this isn't about them, it's about their job. But the identity "FamilySearch" has become a catch-all - we need to see which section in FS, as Paul says above, in order to get a basic idea what's going on. Thus "FS Support", "FS Database Admin", "FS Data Maintenance" are all possibilities for the sort of thing that I'd like to see. Who knows, such an identity might have sufficed to give us a clue here.