Add "I'm alive!" option when person logs onto their account and a duplicate has erroneously been mar

LegacyUser

Lynn Haddock said: Occasionally a living person is accidentally marked deceased by someone else. When this happens and the living person logs on to the app, a message pops up that a duplicate record "of a loved one" was marked as deceased and asks if they would like to merge their record with it and mark him/herself as deceased. This can be disturbing. Even if it doesn't change the erroneous record, there should also be an option to click, "Hey, that was a mistake, I'm alive!"
Thank you!!!

LegacyUser

Brett said: Lynn

I have not done one for some time; but, ...

If the "Duplicate" of the "Living" You (or, someone else) has been make as "Deceased"; then, You can "Change" the 'Status' to "Living"; or, I think it maybe that you "Request" for 'Support' to make them "Deceased" - through a 'Support' Case; and, then, if 'Support' does; then, they will then put that newly made "Living" individual/person in Your "Private Spaces"; where, You can "Merge"/"Combine" your "Living" selves (or, others individuals/persons).

Or, of course, you can just send the User/Patron who just made the "Living" individual/person as "Deceased", a 'Message' through "User Messaging" of "FamilySearch" (and/or, by direct email provide an e-mail address is available) to the fact that You (or, someone else) are/is "Alive" ... they may actually be a Relative ... a new (or, known) contact for you.

You could try both, that way you have 'all bases covered' - the best of both worlds.

Just a thought.

Brett

.

LegacyUser

Merlene Juergens said: I was working down a family line and found a woman who was dead and buried. But she is still very much alive. I tried to change her status to living and could not. That record change has a hard stop on that requires you to submit a case to FamilySearch support. They responded with "we will investigate". They corrected the issue in less than 24 hours.

These issues occur because someone looks at a record and says 'ummm...1939. That's really old. He must be dead by now' , and happily click the button that allows them to create a record.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Quote from a popular medieval movie:

"I'M NOT DEAD YET!"

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: i know that some folks will intentionally create records that are marked deceased when they probably know it is not true. When using the source linker to attach a census record to the various members of a family in the early to mid 1900's, by going ahead and marking them as deceased, it makes it easier for the hints engine to find if there are any death related records for that person. I think that at one time hints were not placed on records of living persons.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but there were at one time definite advantages to marking a recent person as deceased if you didn't know for sure but suspected that there was a good chance that they were (decease).

LegacyUser

Ken G Moyer said: 1939 is not old, I'm alive

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Although I'm familiar with the movie from which it comes, I'm (going literal here) not aware of movies made in the medieval times. :-)

LegacyUser

Merlene Juergens said: Exactly! It's a matter of perspective.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Monks could probably do lots of pictures with slight differences, put them in a flip-book (of parchment?) and voila - moving pictures. Shouldn't take to long to create a movie of The Bible... :-)

LegacyUser

Lynn Haddock said: Thanks, everyone!

I am aware of how to change a person from deceased to living--a contact to Familysearch where a case must be created. My concern is for the poor person, usually older, logging on to their phone and to them it LOOKS like Familysearch considers them dead with no way to fix it. It can be quite distressing even though there is an answer. This is the message that popped up on a phone in my family this week:

"We have found a duplicate copy of this relative (you) that is marked as deceased. Your private copy is marked as living. Would you like to mark your copy (yourself!) as deceased and merge it with the duplicate copy?"
There is no other option but merge or cancel. There needs to also be an I'm alive option. Keep in mind that this is for and about someone logging on to their own account.

At first I thought a placebo "I'm alive" button would suffice, but now I think if a person who has a duplicate marked deceased logs on, an option should be a button that submits a case to either reverse the deceased indicator, OR marks the duplicate as NOT a duplicate for that person. The button can just say "I'm alive!" but it would have two functions--the most important being eliminating the distress of being thought dead by your trusted Familysearch!

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Lynn,

Please forgive my levity which almost Hijacked your topic :-)

I would think that this situation would be possible to detect and mitigate by the system--at least for patrons with church member accounts. If you are a member, your original PID was populated from church records when you created your FS account. As a result the system can tell the differences between your personal PID and duplicates that others have created. When a member passes away and that is entered into the church records, that person's PID can be moved into a deceased state by the system.

I'm not sure how that works with non-member accounts, but those persons do have a root PID in those accounts so you might think that the system could tell the difference for them as well.

In any event, that message does sound rather ludicrous in the first place, and of course shouldn't be sent to any account where the root PID of the account is a possible duplicate of the PID being referenced. The obvious (and incorrect) assumption is that nobody receiving the message is the person being referenced. The message is being sent to ANYONE with a duplicate PID somewhere in their private space, even if that duplicate happens to be the root PID for that account.

So they send a message to that person to ask them if they would like to mark themselves as dead (meaning of course that they would have to be LIVING in order to respond to the message--but that's another different issue). That's pretty well NOT-ok.

They could fix this by adding code to check if the potential duplicate happens to be the root PID of the account. However, an even simpler way would be to change the message to be more generic instead of so personal.

For example, the message could be changed to say something like:

The Family Tree record (*put record name and PID here*) has recently been marked as deceased. This record appears to be a possible duplicate of a LIVING record in your Private Space (*put private space record name and PID here*).

Would you like to merge your private space record with the possible duplicate in the tree as a deceased person?

Normally, the person would have a possible duplicate in their private space and would probably be happy to be alerted to this. If the person being notified was actually the possible duplicate, then they would become very interested in who in the system just marked them as dead (again being glad that they found out about it, even though they'd probably be ticked-off that someone was so uninformed as to treat them - a living person - as though they were dead).

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Lol. A sequence of thoughts hit me as I read what you wrote.

1. Monks putting together a luminary flip book bible.
2. Minions at the beginning of their films seeing the logo and excitedly yelling out "Illumination!"
3. Minion monks with the same excitement yelling out a miraculous exclamation as their copy of the scriptures comes alive with the world's first animation that pictorially explains some amazing historical Bible event, "Illumination!"
4. Visually seeing things going chaotic quickly as minions try to elaborate on that with more human frailties meant to be funny. (Shadrach, Mesa and Abednago cast into an oven, and one of them farts, to flaming, inflammatory, explosive results, but otherwise okay, and the Minion monks laughing about it, punctuated with "OOH's" and a rush to one up that version with their own luminary flip book version.)

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Forgive my levity.

The basic premise that anyone can make a change on their own that disappears the data from view of others has to be carefully considered. I made this mistake when someone I distantly knew (very old) was not responding to queries, and their daughter later reached out to me about how to take them out as they were still alive. (I recall someone else had created it and marked them as deceased, but I had added more info.)

I knew making them "alive" would cause it to disappear from my view as well, after I had attached lots of newspaper stories about them.

I took a screen shot of the person (including their PID), submitted a notice to Familysearch about their living status, and after that status change was made, they disappeared. There was no way to see it because it was not in my private space.

About 6 months later when they died, I contacted familysearch again, with the PID (unseen by me), and proof, through links to their obituary online at reputable news sites, and they marked them as deceased, and all my sources were still attached.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: And one cannot protect the feelings of a living subject because of the mistakes of others. You can only hope that that they are able to see the links on each website page that mentions how to rectify errors. Or understand that they can use the help feature in the phone app, where the notice doesn't appear.