Born within 110 years needs death date to be marked deceased
I would like to see a new feature under the field Death.
If a person was born within 110 years it should be impossible to mark the person as deceased unless a death date is provided.
If one is working with people that are less than 110 years old it should be a close relative, certainly within 4 generations, and then it will not be any problem to find information as to whether this close relative is dead or alive.
If one is not that close to the person then one should reconsider if this is work one should be doing. One would need permission to do temple work for the person anyway, so then one should know them well enough to be able to find out if the person is living or dead.
It is much easier to change a person from living to deceased than the other way around.
I have shown FamilySearch Family Tree to investigators and they are shocked to find that their close relatives are marked as dead while they are indeed living. I have also been asked by members what to do when their parent has been marked as deceased when that parent is still living. If it required a death date for those born within 110 years these situations would not occur.
Thank you!
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I love ideas like this. They get people thinking about the problem and brainstorming ideas.
Here are a few thoughts to consider.
Is a death date or year always knowable to the closest living relative? First example I can think of is missing persons. Unknown death because of War and other circumstances. Would we be encouraging people to lie so they can get legitimate work done? What process will they have to go through to not put fake date and do it right?
This requirement is very temple work centric that would be forced on to the rest of the FamilySearch community. It could be argued that we are protecting living information, but that kind of rule would be closer to 70 years, like the census release.
What if the person is create as deceased without a birth date and then the birth date is added later? Do we revert them too living?
Maybe this would fit better in a temple qualification rule.
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Thank you for your feedback. To address your concerns:
Is a death date or year always knowable to the closest living relative? First example I can think of is missing persons. Unknown death because of War and other circumstances.
Yes. If you are 50 years old, we are talking about your parents or grandparents and their siblings. I would think you would know if they are living. It is people that are not close relation to you that are marking them deceased because they have not bothered to reach out to you to find out the information. If a person is missing we can not mark them dead until the court declare them deceased. And then there will be that legal document to use as a source.
Would we be encouraging people to lie so they can get legitimate work done?
That is exactly what is happening now. People are lying by marking them dead. And if you are doing temple work for someone who is less than 110 years old and you are not the closest relative you are breaking the church 110 year policy.
What process will they have to go through to not put fake date and do it right?
Do decent research. It is not hard to fine when someone died within the last 110 years.
This requirement is very temple work centric that would be forced on to the rest of the FamilySearch community. It could be argued that we are protecting living information, but that kind of rule would be closer to 70 years, like the census release.
We are to protect the information of the living. By marking them dead when they in fact are alive, we are breaching the privacy laws. You are not to do temple work for people that are living, they have to do it themselves. And you are not to do temple work for persons that you are not the closest relative to without permission within their 110 years since birth. There are many non-members using Family Tree who find their relatives marked as dead. Someone posted here in Communities just the other day that she found herself dead. This is a big embarrassment for FamilySearch as a genealogy program.
What if the person is create as deceased without a birth date and then the birth date is added later? Do we revert them to living?
Yes, you will need to revert them to living unless you have proof they are dead within the 110 year rule. You have to contact FamilySearch to change a person that is marked dead to be marked living, while you yourself can mark them as deceased when you have a death date.
Maybe this would fit better in a temple qualification rule.
This actually has very little to do with temple work. It has to do with people offending others by marking them dead, people putting FamilySearch at legal risk due to privacy violations, and people giving the impression that Family Tree is a place filled with sloppy, careless users.
Is a death date or year always knowable to the closest living relative?
It is much better for a living person to be marked alive and err on that side, than to mark a living person deceased. If the closest relative does not know if they are dead or alive, which I believe is a slim chance, then there is no problem to wait until 110 years has gone by since their birth. Remember, these people may only be 40-60 years older than yourself.
Let me again stress what a common and poor practice this is. Just search Communities and you will find nearly every day someone complaining he, or a living sibling, or a living parent have been entered in Family Tree as deceased.
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Great feedback!
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It should also be understood that just because a person is a close relative it doesn't mean we know if they are living or dead. As has been pointed out with those missing in action (there have been many conflicts since WWII) or people who have just disappeared. I searched for my father for over thirties years and didn't find out until last year that he had died in 2005. There was conflicting information I had heard that he had been seen after that date, yet other information led me to believe he had died. We do need to be careful and add sources where possible. Should a source for a death within the last 110 years be made vital? I can't answer that question but I do know if it was me and I found out I had been declared dead I would not be particularly happy. Also there is the other side of the coin, what if we believe someone we had been searching for for years, was dead because of erroneous information, then later found they weren't yet we could have found them before they actually died?
I did err on the side of caution and did not mark my father as deceased until I had the correct information.
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Today I got another request for help from a daughter with a living father who is marked deceased in FamilyTree. He is alive and doing well at 76 years old. I wish we could write the program so this would not happen.
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Many users will simply omit or estimate a birthdate over 110 years to avoid having to add a source
Many currently type a “.” in the reason statement now
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I'm not sure it's accurate to say that many users will omit or estimate a birthdate in order to avoid having to add a source. I've worked with many users since Family Tree started in 2012, and I've never met someone who did that. There probably are users who do, but I suspect they're in the minority.
I also have never seen a "." in the reason statement field (though I have seen some rather silly statements, on occasion, like the user who wrote "yup" as a reason statement :D). Also, the new canned reason statements are about the same as typing "." They convey no useful information.
For users who are faking dates or writing unhelpful reason statements, I think the solution is better education and better system impedences.
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My concern is not for those who are close to 110 years old. To estimate a birthdate of a person born in 1950 to be over 110 years would most likely make him older than his parents which the system would flag.
Unfortunately, the use of "." in the reason statement is way too common.
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Here are other examples of how wide spread this problem is. Excerpt from the thread:
My dad recently reported to me that my LIVING grandma is on family search as DEAD.
I had a similar problem. I contacted Salt Lake.
I had the same problem with my father & brother--that they both were deceased. They are very much alive.
I had to prove to FS that a woman in my family was alive and did not die with the death date FS showed. I did it by getting a obit of her husband who died after the death date they were showing as hers.
I had this problem recently. Two of my living cousins were listed as deceased on FamilySearch. I contacted them.
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Yesterday I found a person in Family Tree marked dead at the age of 97 with the reason statement stating one word: age If it has been less than 110 years since birth people should not be able to mark someone dead just because they think they must be dead.
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As I was born in 1950 I can assure anyone and everyone I'm nowhere near 110 years old. This is as bad as having a child/children added to parent who died years, sometimes decades before they were born, making this the new definition of 'phantom pregnancy.'
One of the problems is 'assuming' something is so without verifying the facts. I found this with the 1939 Register, which closed in 1991. It was assumed that anyone whose record could be seen had died before 1991. This is NOT true. My father was listed and his record was not redacted, so was readable yet he died years later. Before he died I had to ask to have him changed from dead to living.
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To see the extent of this problem of people being marked as deceased when still living, just put "change to deceased" in the main search box in Communities to get this: https://community.familysearch.org/en/search?query=change%20to%20deceased&scope=site&source=community
At least half of the results are about people being marked as deceased when they were not.
Yesterday I was working on an extended family and came to a spot where four brothers had recently had records created by the same researcher who was clearly doing this through attaching hints. The required reason statement just referred to how old they were. Now they were all in their 90s, but that doesn't mean they all had to be dead. There was no indication this other user ever intended to come back and add more information or document their "deaths."
I was able to find death information about all four of them in about half an hour using a cemetery database for the area they lived. There are so many online resources so easily available for finding death information within the last 110 years that there isn't much of an excuse for anyone not to take the time to find it and add it to Family Tree if they want to make a deceased record for someone.
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I agree that a cemetery data base is very useful, I found a close relative using Google and A Billion Graves. There is also, if you are English or Welsh, the GRO. The death records go from 1837-1957 and 1989-2020
I find this site invaluable.
What will be useful is the programme to photograph every gravestone in Britain, it will take about seven years, but should prove very useful for present and future family history hunters.
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I still run into temple work being done for people while they are alive. This work is of course invalid. But it is done because they were marked deceased with no death date (and no close living relatives were listed). The problem is that the invalid ordinances will be listed there forever and the valid work will never be done. The only time it will be noticed and corrected is if the children of the people are members and are going to do the work themselves.
I really hope that the program will make it harder for users to mark people deceased that are less than 110 years old. Requiring a death date for people less than 110 years would be of great help.
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I know that my uncle died while I was at college. That's a four-year window. There's a government portal that could tell me the year, if I had an I.D. number — but I don't.
My mother and I can't remember whether Dad died on the 1st or the 2nd (13 years ago). I suppose it's on the death certificate, which is somewhere in a box.
I'm not LDS, so "temple work" is not a consideration for me, but I really do not think it would be useful to instate a death date requirement for recent people. Responsible sorts already don't create profiles without reasonable evidence of death, while irresponsible (or thoughtless) people would likely simply guess at a date (or just put in today's date) and call it good. Even if they label the guess as a guess, the system will present it in most places as truth, thus preventing or delaying research into the actual death date.
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