Article Confusion
I am a Service Missionary at the St. George FamilyHistory Center for the past three years and a former FamilySearch call center Missionary. There is an article dated Oct 18 2024 titled "What happens to memories after the contributor dies?"
Throughout this Article it shares to tag Memories to people (at least one) in their Family Tree.The confusion with many in our Center is they have concluded this means they need to tag all their Memories in their own Person Page to someone else deceased because they read this article to mean that when they die, their account is locked and all their Memories cannot be seen unless people search for them under a title or topic tag, etc. using the Memories search function.
We know this is not correct. When a person dies and FamilySearch is aware of the death, the person account IS locked, but once this death information is added, Living Ordinances are added by FamilySearch and the deceased person is now available to see along with their Living Ordinances and ALL their Memories, not marked Private.
I understand that as people change this person to deceased in their own FamilySearch Account there may be duplicates that need to be Merged, but the "Master" ID that has the deceased persons Ordinances, completed when they were alive, as well as all their Memories they put in while they were living and NOT marked Private.
My concern is, if this situation is not clarified, people will Tag all their own Memories, for themselves, to their Parents, or Grandparents or other deceased people AND those persons Memories will be inundated with Memories that don't necessarily tie directly to them.
If I am incorrect in these assumptions, I would greatly appreciate your feedback.
Answers
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@GalerGlennStephen I would point these people who are confused to the help article How do I tag memories of my ancestors or relatives in the Family Tree? The first sentence says "Tags on photos and documents identify the people who are in them" (emphasis added). That is the fundamental principle of all tagging for Memories in Family Tree: you tag the people who actually appear in the memory. You don't tag the contributor, you don't tag a relative, and you don't tag someone who has some other connection but doesn't appear in the memory. I've seen all those things done, but they are all wrong, and have negative consequences.
It is indeed a very poor practice for people to tag all their contributed memories to their own profile or to any other profile for someone who does not appear in the memory. It clutters the memory lists for people incorrectly tagged, and confuses other users who will understandably wonder why this photo of other people appears in that person's memory list. One can also run into limits — only 1000 memories can be tagged for a certain profile in Family Tree, and if a lot of memories are incorrectly tagged to a profile, that profile may hit the 1000 memory limit prematurely, preventing other memories from being associated with that person's profile.
Just one clarification to what you said about the visibility of memories as a person is marked deceased. There is actually no change in the visibility of any memory when a contributor dies. Each memory is either Private (not visible to anyone other than the contributor) or Public (visible to everyone). When a person's profile is marked deceased, then the profile becomes visible and any Memory Tags associated with that profile will become visible. Of course, once those memory tags become visible, it will become a lot easier to find any public memories associated to those tags, but it doesn't change the fundamental visibility of those memories.
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@Alan E. Brown Wonderful information for eveyone trying to learn how to navigate memories! Thank you so much.
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Thank you for your response. It helps alot
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This does sound like an issue we can share with the team that writes the Help Articles. It is always great to get feedback on the instructions in those Help Articles! Thank you for sharing….I will now share it with the Memories team.
Thanks!
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Thank you
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will the memories tagged “Private” ever become “Public”?
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@maryrjurgaitis A memory that has its visibility set to Private can only become public if the owner (contributor) of that memory specifically changes the visibility to Public.
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thanks for that answer. That brings up another question.
I have many family photos containing both deceased and living people. If I tag the deceased persons in a private photo, will that photo be attached to the deceased person?
If I have photos of just myself , once I am deceased and the PID’s for me created by others and all those deceased me’s are merged, will those photos then be visible to anyone with a FamilySearch account? (Hope this question makes sense.)
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It is important to remember what "private" means — it will stay private. If I tag anyone on that private memory, it will NOT display on their person page. Because it is private. (Of course, if I am logged in on my account and I marked the memory private, I can still see it because it is not private to me….but if I log in under my son's account, I cannot see that private memory on any people it has been tagged to.)
The only scenario where a private memory can be viewed by others is if you attach that private memory to a specified Family Group.
Your second question:
Yes, if the memory is PUBLIC and you have tagged it to yourself, then once you are deceased, that memory will remain attached to your profile.
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great clarification for me. Thank you.
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