Spouse's tree

Discussions about using and improving the new FamilySearch online application.
rmrichesjr
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Re: Spouse's tree

#21

Post by rmrichesjr »

That's a very convenient feature. It would seem it must have been added more recently, because I'm pretty sure no information about my member parents was visible until I entered it myself in about 2014. That feature would make it much more convenient for new users to get started.
eblood66
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Re: Spouse's tree

#22

Post by eblood66 »

rmrichesjr wrote:That's a very convenient feature. It would seem it must have been added more recently, because I'm pretty sure no information about my member parents was visible until I entered it myself in about 2014. That feature would make it much more convenient for new users to get started.
As far as I know this was a feature of Family Tree since it's inception (and I think of New Family Search before it). At very least I was able to see this information without entering anything when I first accessed Family Tree just after it was released (which I believe was around 2012 or 2013). However, it's quite possible that information doesn't always transfer over correctly. My son's account shows a similar situation to the original posters. We've never entered any information using his account but it shows us (his parents) and all his grandparents with links further up the tree except that it doesn't show any ancestors of his maternal grandmother even though she and they were all members. And even more strangely my wife's account does show her mother's ancestors and I'm pretty sure we never entered links. So apparently in her private space the information was correctly populated but in his it wasn't complete.
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aebrown
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Re: Spouse's tree

#23

Post by aebrown »

jessneb24 wrote:Not quite! On my family tree is shows both my parents and their parents and so on back hundreds of years even though both my parents are alive. My husbands family tree shows his dad even though his alive and his parents and so on back hundreds of years. His mom’s side only shows his mom and won’t show her parents or any other relative on that side even though they’ve all passed away and had their work down but he can’t see any of that. So why would on mine it let me see my parents (even though they’re alive) and the rest of my ancestors, but his tree will only show his dads side. Does that make better sense?
FamilySearch can only link persons in Family Tree using membership records to the extent that the persons in FamilyTree (living or dead) are actually linked to membership records. Certain living person records are connected to membership records (for example. my Family Tree record is connected to my living parents because they are both members of the Church, their records on Family Tree are connected to their membership records, and my membership record correctly lists my connection to my parents). But if any of those factors are missing, Family Tree will not automatically link a person to his or her parents.

In this case, there could be several reasons why your husband's mother's record is not linked to her deceased parents. Perhaps her record was created manually (not automatically based on membership records). There's no way for you to know exactly why, but it doesn't really matter. No matter the reason, you can quite easily fix the issue by adding her parents to her. Or it might be easier to go to one of her parents' records and add her as a child to them -- the result would be the same. Once you link her to her parents, then she will automatically be linked to all the generations beyond them.
kevbel71
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Re: Spouse's tree

#24

Post by kevbel71 »

The problem I see is the massive number of duplicate entries we are creating. I come from a very large family, and each of them has to create me manually for me to be on their tree. When I die there could be 200-300 versions of me that will have to be merged together. We are creating a problem for the generations to come.

The solution I see:
Let us link to someone living (like a spouse or parent) with their permission so we don't create a duplicate. Limit the information shown for any living people in their tree to "information that is highly available to the public", and for the rest just show "This information is not available to you". Or maybe even just a placeholder entry that says "Living relative: Details not available". As birth certificates and marriage certificates are public record I don't think an entry on my tree with just the name and the rest of the details hidden would be a big privacy problem, and that way I could link to my wife and see full information for the deceased members of her tree and limited information for the living, all with creating no duplicates. We would be able to verify that we don't have missing entries in our current generations as well, which is currently done by creating duplicates.

But maybe I am wrong. I'm not a lawyer, just a person concerned with the issue we are creating for our children.
RBeatse
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Re: Spouse's tree

#25

Post by RBeatse »

@kevbel71, I fully agree with you. This has been my concern for years! You should be able to send a “family”request (like a Facebook friend request”) and if they agree to it, then your records are shared.
russellhltn
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Re: Spouse's tree

#26

Post by russellhltn »

The problem I see is that FS is all about the deceased, yet people keep trying to use it to document the living. In the immortal words of Monty Python, "I'm not dead yet". Inputting information about the living is fraught with privacy and legal concerns. My personal advice is to only input the living to the extent needed to link to the deceased. Typically that would be living parents in order to link to the deceased ancestors.

Documenting the living for future genealogists is something that I don't think we've been given guidance on. *IF* there is a process for making the living in FS visible in the future, it's probably going to based on something like a 120 years from the birth date (since there will be no one to record death dates). By that time, it's likely to be old news.
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RBeatse
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Re: Spouse's tree

#27

Post by RBeatse »

But the problem with that logic is that we are adding work for our future generations. If I put a picture in FS and tag my (deceased) grandfather in a picture and my brother and I happen to be in the picture, I can tag me but if I tag my brother I have to have added him to “my” FS and then others do the same but we are all tagging the person with multiple person records. Once either one of us dies, there will be multiple ID's tagged to it.

If we don’t put living people data into FS, then our ancestors will get a picture with my grandfather tagged but not me and then they have to do the work, when I know who it is.
drepouille
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Re: Spouse's tree

#28

Post by drepouille »

kevbel71 wrote:I come from a very large family, and each of them has to create me manually for me to be on their tree.
kevbel71 wrote:Limit the information shown for any living people in their tree ...
kevbel71 wrote:As birth certificates and marriage certificates are public record I don't think an entry on my tree ...
kevbel71 wrote:I could link to my wife and see full information for the deceased members of her tree ...
FamilySearch Family Tree is a single tree, a collaborative database which we all share, similar to a Wiki. I can see and modify every deceased person on "your tree" and you can see and modify every deceased person on "my tree".
If you want to have full control over your personal family tree, then you should be using another service or FamilySearch partner, such as Ancestry.com to manage your family records. In your Ancestry family tree, you can freely add living individuals, who are displayed as "private" to the rest of the world. You have full control over the visibility of records in your Ancestry tree.
Dana Repouille, Plattsmouth, Nebraska
rmrichesjr
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Re: Spouse's tree

#29

Post by rmrichesjr »

kevbel71 wrote:The problem I see is the massive number of duplicate entries we are creating. I come from a very large family, and each of them has to create me manually for me to be on their tree. When I die there could be 200-300 versions of me that will have to be merged together. We are creating a problem for the generations to come.

...
I think it will all work out okay.

There are already many deceased persons who are combinations of many dozens to a few hundreds of component records. Early on, nearly a decade ago, the software/hardware infrastructure got slow on combinations of more than about 150 component records. Since then, the hardware and software have become much faster. By the time the 200-300 versions of you become publicly visible, the system will probably be able to handle it. If not, changes could be made to the system to better handle that situation.

The manual effort of combining the duplicate records will be spread out broadly enough that it won't be a serious problem. Each user who entered a version of you will need to combine their private version of you with the record that comes from official Church records (and the other once-private versions of you that have already been combined in). If that manual effort becomes too much on a wide scale, the software could be changed to automate much/most/all of the combining of duplicate records.

While I'm not involved with the software development of Family Tree, I have worked in software development for enough years, and I saw enough of the thought and inspiration that went into the NewFamilySearch beta and deployment to be very confident that sufficient thought and planning has already been done on the issue of dozens to perhaps a few hundreds of versions of each current Church member who will someday pass on.
MatthewKBChambers
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Joined: Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:07 am

Re: Spouse's tree

#30

Post by MatthewKBChambers »

If my spouse (living), has their separate “private” account and they provide me with their 9 digit account number, shouldn’t I be able to link them? I would be upholding privacy laws and getting their legal permission. Or when they give me the 9 digit account number, couldn’t I enter it, then it would send that account an accept or reject decision, thereby granting permission legally?
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