During the COVID 19 outbreak, remove the restriction access as long we must stay at home

LegacyUser

Thomas Cerveto said: For now, French, Spanish and Italian peoples are confined at home for an indefinite duration.

We don't have many things to do, it would be great if we could get access to every documents that are under a restricted access for now...

LegacyUser

Paul said: One would hope that FamilySearch partners might be willing to make such an offer, regarding unrestricted access to their material for a limited period. However, it could also be argued that those not leaving their homes will be saving enough money to enable them to take out a short-term subscription to one of the major commercial companies, or buy copies of documents from record repositories!

I'm just playing the devil's advocate here, as the situation will shortly be affecting my movements, too, and I'd be delighted at having the opportunity you suggest.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Unfortunately, the contracts allowing access are legal documents and would need to be renegotiated in order to increase access. That process alone could take months, if not years.

LegacyUser

m said: I would like to make some suggestions for what to do while at home:

1) record audio files of your most elderly relatives recounting something important that you wish to memorialize.
2) label the backs of photographs and ask your most elderly relatives if there is someone you can't identify.
3) buy DNA kits for your most elderly relatives (and I don't know if that is possible in those countries).
4) record on Familytree the physical attributes of deceased family members by asking your most elderly relatives what they were. (Useful for DNA.)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Thomas,

Welcome to the FamilySearch forum at GetSatisfaction.com!

Your request has been made by others recently and would seem like a great idea.

Unfortunately, all access and access restrictions that can be seen in FamilySearch are legally controlled by the MANY contracts that are in place with the owners of those sources. In order to provide an exception to ANY of the contracts would require yet another contract to lay out the legal limitations of the new, temporary exception. Furthermore, I suspect that the owners of those sources would likely not be interested in spending money and a lot of time on their lawyers just to put temporary exception contracts in place when it doesn't provide them with any significant benefits.

So although the request would be nice, I'm pretty sure that such a thing is very unlikely to happen.

Note that like most folks posting on the forum here, I am not an employee of FamilySearch and I have no authority to speak for them. You can usually identify a FS employee that posts here by their icon and the text "Employee" on it indicating that they are an "Official Representative".

LegacyUser

FamilySearch Moderator said: Thank you for your inquiry and suggestion. We have had several requests in this regard as a result of the temporary closing of our Family History Library and family history centers due to COVID-19 precautions. Due to contractual obligations, we unfortunately cannot offer expanded external access to records restricted to family history centers and affiliate libraries. We apologize for this inconvenience.

In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the vast record collections that are available on FamilySearch. Millions of new indexed records and images are added weekly. And if you haven’t used our new Explore Historical Images tools, you might be surprised at the potential discoveries you can make in our growing unindexed image collections.

We appreciate your patience, loyalty, and support,

FamilySearch Support

LegacyUser

FamilySearch Moderator said: .

LegacyUser

David Picken said: If it were just a question of finding a useful way to pass the time during curfew, then indexing or researching lines in other geographies would certainly be candidates.

If, and that was the background to my original question (on Yammer), you are researching a specific line and get the message that you need to visit the FHC, then the alternatives are little or no consolation.

The kind of "technical" solution I was thinking of was to let the provider know that a member of the church is accessing their server. That should not be impossible, because our membership numbers are linked to our FS accounts. I admit that "member of the church" and "patron visiting the FHC" are not identical subsets, but this solution could perhaps satisfy the contractual requirements, at least during the crisis situation.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: The contracts are specific and make no exceptions for situations like the past few weeks. Many specify quite clearly that you must be at a FHC (and sometimes Afiliate Libraries also have access). Some contracts already give Latter Day Saints access to the records from any computer.

If FS violates their contracts, they risk massive legal consequences, and if it became widely known, many record custodians would lose faith in them and terminate their contracts, thus leading to millions, even billions of records having to be taken off the FS website.

As a non-LDS member, I am strongly opposed to your idea, but something along those lines would be a good idea- maybe a maximum number of users (from any religion) can visit each record set per day. That would be a substitute for having to visit a FHC or AL. Of course, this would need to be approved by the record custodian- but FS could and should promote this option to record custodians. It would only be feasible to do this for a small number of larger record sets, and the ability of both FS and record custodians to agree to and sign legal contracts is very limited during this time.