Proposal: Allow merge of Living to Deceased

LegacyUser

David Wynn said: So much has changed in FS over the last several years. We're now allowed, without restriction or warning to add records to a living profile. If said record includes details about that person's death, then the profile transitions from living to deceased easily, since the user is currently viewing a record that shows the person in question to be deceased.

Please consider taking this to the next logical step. Allow for the merging of a living and a deceased individual. FS already has in place code that can force a merger to only go one way under certain circumstances. (I believe this typically happens when one profile has ordinances on record that the other does not. The merge will switch to retain the profile with the ordinances.) So, the groundwork is already in place to force these to also go only one way.

Under this proposal, the merge could proceed, but only if the retained profile is the deceased profile. Under current guidelines, in order to merge the two, I first need to mark the living profile as deceased, then return to the merge. This is an extra step that is largely unnecessary and often unwanted, as it opens the possibility for merging a publicly available profile into a profile that has private up to that time.

Such a proposal would not prevent people from doing what is currently allowed (marking a living profile as deceased, then allowing merges to either profile), but it would remove several extra clicks if the genealogist agrees to merge the "living" profile to the deceased.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: That's an interesting idea. But I'm trying to figure out the ramifications of such a change and if the benefits outweigh the negatives. 
- I'm not understanding why marking it deceased opens the possibility of exposing private info. If they are both deceased they will be public. So if you think one is living and one deceased then they shouldn't be merged as they are two different real-world people.
- It seems that the step to mark the Person deceased is very important. That puts that Person in the public space and relationships that were private can come be assessed and where the various warning and helps can come into play. Things like hints, data quality, and duplicate warnings can now be seen. 
- If we allowed deceased-living merges then the software in Merge now has to now handle the Persons and the relationships in the public and private spaces.
- The change log could not show the private PID info of the Merge to all users like a public deceased PID can.
- The act of marking a Person as deceased takes a deliberate conclusion change by the user. That action needs to be captured as a conclusion change by that user and will make them think a bit longer.
Let me know if I'm not thinking about this right. 

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: It seems to me the only time this action could happen is if the user has a living record they created in their private space and a deceased record appears. That deceased record was either created by the user or by someone else. If it was created by the user then there are two records for the person created by the user, which in my opinion is very unlikely. The other situation where another user creates a deceased record is either correct or incorrect. IE the deceased was created by mistake (there are many of these created from obit's where incorrect deceased records are created) or the individual really died. In any situation, I believe the user who created the living record should investigate and make sure the individual is deceased before even considering a merge. I think the couple of actions to make the living record deceased are justified and do not believe it is worth spending development time on this issue. In my mind there are much more important issues like shared living and lost memories at death that need to be considered.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Taking a record from Living to Deceased is relatively straightforward, unlike taking a deceased person to living, which engages support.

Therefore, if the "living person" in the user's private space has died, all they have to do is to document the evidence and then the record can be merged with a profile that is already deceased.

If the person's profile indicates they are deceased, then mark the record as living, provide evidence, and let support handle the situation. The profile will end up in the original user's private space and nothing else needs to be done.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Incidentlally, I've run into the living to deceased with a cousin when the partner sent me a copy of the obit. That was easy.

In the case of the reverse, I did this recently and the matter was resolved fairly quickly. The profile ended up in the original user's private space and I could no longer see it, but that was unimportant, since my primary concern is something that Joe Martel mentioned -- exposure of private information for a living person to the general public.

LegacyUser

David Wynn said: I'm going to skip over my minor quibbles on your earlier arguments, and jump to the end. I'll admit I don't know the code / concerns well enough, so I'm trusting your judgement and those of other employees. It very well may be more of a leap than is feasible to pull the data from the signed-in user's private space and add to the deceased profile all in one go. The jump from living to deceased may be far more complicated than the simple radio-button push leads us to believe. If that's the case so be it, it may be better for the system to handle the living-to-deceased transition first, then deal with the merge. This was after all, just an exploratory, ease-of-use request. Thank you for your time and your response.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: I love original thinking. It may not play out, but can lead to other ideas. THanks.