Possible or Partial Solution to Preventing "Living" individuals being entered as "Deceased" in Famil
This year LDSAFA (https://sites.google.com/view/ldsafa/home) has received a number of comments from its members who say that their relatives and others are increasingly listing "Living" individuals as "Deceased" on FamilySearch--especially since the 1940 U.S. Census was released and more obituaries are available online (which list the names of "survivors" of the deceased). In fact I recently had to deal with this issue within my own family--when a relative entered over six dozen "Living" individuals as "Deceased" into FamilySearch. Last week an LDSAFA member suggested that this problem might be minimized if FamilySearch were to automatically remind its patrons that when they click "Deceased" for people who were born within the past 110 years that they need to make sure that those people have actually died (such as by imputing a death or burial date/place), otherwise they need to click "Living" when entering them into FamilySearch. Is this possible?
Comments
-
It likely is possible and would be a great idea! The same limitation should be applied to the importing of GEDCOM files and uploading person records from third party applications and websites--anyplace that someone is about to create a new PID.
It's really not very nice when people look online and discover that someone has declared them as dead!
Also people will intentionally mark records as deceased so that they can have "complete families" recorded without having to be responsible for names in their private space. Also at one time (not sure if this is still true or not), if you wanted the hints engine to help you put families together, it would not look at living records. That problem was handled by some people by intentionally marking a living person record as deceased.
0 -
As I have mentioned in previous posts, for reasons of privacy and respect of other relatives' wishes, I do not add any living OR deceased individuals to Family Tree of my parents' or my own generation.
However, with regards to the "Living", I have always considered it somewhat contradictory that FamilySearch publishes so much personal detail on living persons (including birth and census records) yet does not allow even a living person's name to be displayed publicly in Family Tree. I am sure I will be told this is down to data protection legislation, etc., but it does seem strange that anyone can find out so much about me from the main FamilySearch site, yet not even be aware of my existence through Family Tree.
Back to the main post: a good idea, except an "about" or "before" conclusion could easily be inputted to the death field, making evidence of death fairly meaningless. Also, the idea is already in operation for occasions when persons under 110 are added via the source linker, so there is really just an inconsistency in the way FamilySearch handles the matter.
0 -
The system already asks you now when you create a new person if you enter a birth year to enter a reason they are deceased if 110 years has not passed. They have added more safeguards but it takes training people to slow down and think.
0 -
It is very difficult to change dead to living. I find several of my kin and friends listed as dead when in fact they are not.
0 -
Currently the workflow for creating a new record from the source linker can be backwards. For example, you are attaching index sources for family members on the 1940 Census and one of the younger members doesn't seem to be in the FSFT yet. This is brand new to you so you go to create a new person record for them in order to complete everything in the source linker. Since you know nothing about that person other than the fact that you've just found them in the census, you now have to provide information whether they are living or deceased. How are you supposed to know that?
So you just create a new record as deceased and later on try to research and see if there are any evidences of death (which could actually be difficult even if they ARE deceased).
For a while you would not get hints for living individuals, so if a death record showed up, you wouldn't see it as a hint unless the person had been marked as deceased. It may still be like that but I don't know for certain.
Anyway, if you were not certain about it, it made more sense to lean toward them being deceased in order to simply find hints about their passing. Even though we are not supposed to do this (i.e., marking people as deceased when we don't know for sure), there are some incentives to do the opposite. Any mitigation to this issue needs to address those counterincentives.
0 -
When is it okay to list a new person as "deceased"? Few people live past 100 years. Is it okay to list anyone over 100+? 105+? 108+? I have wondered this every time I come across a new person over 100 yet not to 110.
0
