Issue 25.16
In May, the Membership Department reconnected to the Family Tree, after having been disconnected since August 2014. That is why deceased members were not being updated in Family Tree. Three different types of records from membership were brought into Family Tree. The records of deceased LDS Church members that were previously hidden because no death date was recorded, that is a good change.
Also brought over were records of family members, not necessarily LDS members, who are deceased. These are usually linked to an LDS member, but they came over as well.
The mistake was the Ancestral File records, which the Membership Department had a copy of. This happened by accident and because there were so many of them and some had already been merged and changed, it cannot be automatically undone. It is a mess for some family lines and can mess up family lines for generations.
They will all need to be merged if they caused duplicate records and most of them did. But, you cannot merge two membership records without creating a case and they are too busy to handle that many cases. I have talked to Ron Tanner and as soon as the Family Tree is moved off new.familysearch.org as part of the backend program platform for the database, the surviving record in any merge must be the record created by the membership department. If you merge now, you would need to be sure the sources attached, the memories, etc. The history would be deleted of the record that merges into the new record that shows as being created by LDS Membership. You would also need to remember to move all relationships to that record.
The best thing to do is wait until Family Tree is moved to the new “tree foundation” and new.familysearch is permanently shut down. Then you will be able to merge the records in either direction. The records will have the option of merging in the logical order and the new incomplete record from membership can be the one deleted by the merge. So I suggest patience until nFS is turned off. Also by waiting, we will be able to merge two membership records or the IOUS (Individuals of Unusual Size) records, which is not currently possible. There change will happen in 2016 and when you see a notice that Family Tree will be shut down for six or more hours that will likely be the big step that we have been waiting for!
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com