Idea for living people being promoted to deceased

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: I wanted to throw out an idea which I can't recall has ever been discussed (my memory isn't the best).

We have all entered data for people found in obituaries who are still alive. They would show up in our private space.

But SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE will know when that person is deceased (in their own private tree).

What if the people who had their copies of these previously living people were notified to check out a possible match (the version that now shows deceased), where the family relationships around them show a substantial match? The person with the live people would get the notification and then look to compare after they received a notification, and then modify the death status of their own person and merge it.

Anyway, it's an idea that would help reduce the number of private listed people (or duplicates).

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: My big worry about this (theoretically highly sensible) suggestion is that we know that the current matching algorithm does produce a number of false positives (probably inevitably) and people seem to act on them without doing any deeper checking. Bad merges of deceased people are bad enough - but bad merges of "living" people suggest serious privacy issues - erroneously releasing the data of genuinely living people into general visibility isn't just a data error, it opens FS up to all sorts of legal threats.

I'm not even convinced that obituaries (to take the specific example) can be trusted to provide enough accurate data to get reasonably accurate matching in the first place.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This has been discussed extensively in the past.

We've been told that FamilySearch is working on the issues involved in allowing people to share living person records (profiles), much like we all share the same deceased person profiles. Allegedly, the legal issues are not the problem but there are internal issues that have to be resolved before this can happen.

The last I remember this discussion was over a year or so ago and I suspect the ongoing rewrite of major portions of the code have the sharing in mind.

Perhaps Joe Martel can bring us up to date and let us know if this is still in the works or something that had to be tabled.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Yes, sharing like that implies knowledge, so such people are far less likely to be fooled by an incorrect suggestion.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: What is the only way to automatically change living people to dead? When they conform to the 110 year rule. That is the point when they are automatically considered to be dead by the system and so is the only point at which they can be sensibly altered. So in other words 110 years after year of birth or 110 years from creation in the system if no year of birth is entered. The second possibility will not occur for a few years yet!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: A feature to list the people in the user's private space is one that hopefully will soon be implemented for the web version. Right now, the mobile apps have the feature.

Once that ability to list the people in our private space is in place, we should be able to quickly review the people and check to see if any have died since we've entered them.

This doesn't fix the problem of those who have the people in their private space and do not log in very often. Those people are likely to sit there for a long time. That is where an automated system should be in place, but the span needs to stick with a bit longer than the oldest confirmed living person. Per Wikipedia, as of 10 May 2020, the oldest known living person is Kane Tanaka of Japan, aged 117 years, 129 days.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: To Adrian's point, by the mouth of two or more witnesses...

To David's point, a family reunion, info cleaned from a photo, newspaper article, or an obituary doesn't have the birthdates of everyone listed, so it's tough to rely on a 110 year rule.

I have thousands, if not tens of thousands of people in my private space, that's nice to list, but a very long list and I need help. (They're not all directly related, as I've followed some prompting in assembling families as I go sideways or follow other crumbs or purple squirrels.)

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: I'm also not suggesting that someone be promoted from private space automatically. I'm asking that when someone (who likely has direct knowledge of their passing) has marked them as deceased, perhaps even with a date and place, that the individuals info and relationships be analyzed before offering a hint to review that person in another patrons private space. A quick Google, findagrave, Facebook, legacy or current newspaper search in a locality (before it goes to legacy) could be conducted.

Once they enter that info in, then a merge hint would be suggested. And you know, being able to see the submitter of that recent death info would have a very high likelihood of finding a relative, with whom you could collaborate with.

LegacyUser

Wayne Cooke said: And some of us that have been around this stuff for a while can remember when it was the "90 year rule". A convert went to get her endowment and it showed that someone had, following the 'rules', done her work. OOPS!!

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: This assumes that the person who added them as deceased knows what they are talking about.

I use the 'Private Person" in the section of the app under My Contributions to check the status of living people I have added. But I don't add everyone in an obituary to FS, especially if they are not likely to become deceased in the near future. I may add them to my back up copy, but not to FS..

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Who should be added from an obituary? The subject (naturally) and anyone else referred to in it who is dead. That requires access to the full text of the obituary so that qualifiers such as late can be seen and acted on.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I'm not sure if I've seen the full text of any obituary on FS (I'm not a Church member if that makes a difference) but I have to say that, from knowing what UK death and funeral notices look like, I would never add a blanket list of names from an "obituary", not even to my private space on FSFT - I don't see any benefit in doing so. If I keep a list of my living relatives in my private space, they'll already be in, and if they're not relatives then, as Christina says, I don't know what I'm talking about!

NB - that does apply solely to "obituaries" - I've not thought about other aspects.

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: Correct. Obituaries were just the most obvious record that would include me any living people. There are full texts of obits available to read on FS.

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: I only used obits as an example because they include many living people.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Some source attachments show a graphical copy (scanned) of obituaries, others have a textual conversion from a paid 3rd party (genealogy bank). Some people put links to newspapers.com clippings (some are free to access by non-paying guests and some aren't, and some people (including myself) will type in or OCR an obituary. I've tried scanning a picture of one and uploading it, but it gets deleted, while I see others who have done so and it gets retained (seen in presentations by others - which just gets me for the inconsistency).

I add names from it, and some end up in private space, with the hopes that collaboration will occur, or that I can later reach out to other relatives, or when others reach out to me having seen my contributions and want to know more about their families and I basically have their tree available to me in private space, and I can also point them to the source of material as well.

There is a future looking aspect to some of what I do, based on the fact that few people do the level of exploration that I do, and that in time, their names will be populated as deceased people for others to discover their families or do ordinance work for them. With families breaking up so much these days and people going their separate ways in occupational pursuits, there is a lot being lost to help people connect with families. And this is my contribution to them.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Another hinting possibility to check for being deceased could be an analysis of relationships (above or sideways with siblings) that suggests that there's a high likelihood of them being deceased, and you get a hint to look further, particularly when there might not be all the birth or death info available, but their placement within a family and time frame makes them good candidates to explore further.

For instance, several siblings (from an obituary) are deceased, and their birth and death periods or years put in with other analysis make it likely that the previously living siblings are now deceased and could be now researched further.

I'm not sure if that would just get misused by people who don't care to do the research and just mark them as deceased. That would give greater weight to having higher quality hints from others who do enter that information, and allowing those with names in their private space to make a better decision. (my original suggestion above)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I don't know if this has changed, but it may have -- in the past we could not use Find to locate any of the people in our private space. With the mobile apps, we can now see a list of people in our private space (which will soon come, according to at least one FS person, to the browser version), so we may be able to use Find to locate people within our private space.

I have adopted the practice to add living people only to my local database and minimize the people in my private space.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Justin - if you can squeeze a mini-tree out of an obit, that is potentially useful, I would say.

More problematic (to me) are obit references to things like "Nellie and the neighbours", which are the sort of things you get in UK funeral notices. I call these problematic since it seems to me that their information payload is minimal, while they would sit cluttering up Private Space. I guess "From Uncle Ted" just might be slightly more useful, though that would very depend on whether my theoretical Ted was a genuine blood relative and of whom.

I guess somewhere there's a trade-off between all the various factors that might not be in the same place for each of us.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: "I'm not sure if that would just get misused by people who don't care to do the research and just mark them as deceased"

That would be my concern - those who accept any hint because "The Computer says so...".

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: The current Beta site has menu option FamilyTree / MyContributions / Private People and this has a filter facility which works on at least name. Without a TARDIS, I cannot, of course, guarantee that the implemented version will include that facility!

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Oh no. I would never add ambiguous references like neighbors! And some of my toughest nuts to crack are those references to sisters or daughters who are really sisters in law, or listed as Mrs. (Insert common surname). In those cases, the number of tabs in my browser explodes as I try to find other articles (old newspapers) where pieces of family structure begin to come together. And sometimes I find other unknown relationships or family members in the process. My fight at that point is to avoid chasing those leads too. (I lose that battle frequently.)

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: OK - your workflow sounds more and more sensible.

LegacyUser

Juli said: I think Justin's proposal is addressing a situation that doesn't really exist, or not in quite the form that his solution would apply to. People who enter a profile as "deceased" for a person who may still be living very, very seldom do so based on any evidence of death. In my experience, these profiles get entered based on an obituary or census or famous spouse's Wikipedia page, with subconscious assumptions about relative ages and probable lifetimes that don't stand up to any scrutiny.

(I've had dead-to-living communications twice now for much-younger wives of famous men. Yes, the wives are mentioned in Wikipedia; that's as it should be: fame has its price in expected levels of privacy. However, FS does not -- and should not -- make any distinction based on fame or notoriety.)

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: oooo...but I like the idea of a hint that they have passed the 110 time frame, if a birth date has been recorded.

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: I've heard it is likely coming when I posted praise for this feature on the app and requested it be added to the web version.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I have now had two instances where a relative was marked as deceased when, in fact, they were not. In both instances, I changed the deceased to living and provided evidence. The last one got a residence entry, since I was able to locate where he was still living. I happened to have worked with him and he is only a few years older than I am. He was living in the same house as when I worked with him.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: The challenge is that when you get a deceased record marked as living, it is moved into your private space and yours only. It disappears from the view of all other patrons in the system. That means whoever put it there in the first place, will likely notice that it is gone and then go in and add it again. They cannot see the change history on or the reason why the name was marked as living.

And it goes 'round and 'round.

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: That and some people just think that anyone born prior to the 1940s are "old enough they must be dead."

I've seen it happen!

LegacyUser

Christina Sachs Wagner said: I do much the same as Justin, except I generally build on Ancestry and upload the deceased to FS. When I add an obit source to a record on FS, I don't usually add the surviving children unless they obviously come within reasonable range of the 110 rule and the possibility of being deceased. Mostly, I limit adding them because I don't want large numbers congregating in my private spaces and at one time they served little purpose, if they didn't link two deceased generations. They simply created work down the road, with little return.

I love that I can now attach sources to them now and eliminate some of the unfinished records hints. I also love that I can find them again on the app and revisit their PIDs to see if there is an update in their mortality status. These two newer features have changed the game in a better way for me and living people.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: Actually Jeff, the submitter will see it, and everyone else doesn't. I had this happen to me, when someone contacted me saying someone who was alive was marked as deceased. They approached me as I had the last change recorded. I screen capture the person (I knew they were nearly dead), and submitted a change to living status. It disappeared from my view. When they did die a few months later, I notified FS, gave them the PID and a two different links to their death info and they changed it to deceased, and I could see it again.

The rain I didn't just make my own copy is because I had attached lots of newspaper articles about their life and relatives and didn't want to duplicate all that again.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Interesting. My experience was that FS marked the person as living and placed them in the requestor's private space.

I suppose that when changing a record from deceased to living, that FS has the choice of where they want to put that living profile. I also then suppose if they see something like the record was created by one person, and you were the only other person who had done work on it, it would make sense to put it into the original creator's private space, especially if YOU were the requestor.

So they may have a criteria of where to put it based on its history.