- Why can’t I see the information for some of the individuals in the family tree?
- But I’m family. Can I please see the hidden individuals?
- How do I create a user account?
- If I see a mistake in the family tree information, can I correct it?
- Where can I find issues of the ten Krazy Ken’s Kin Newsletter published in 2017?
- What doesn’t work yet?
Q. Why can’t I see the information for some of the individuals in the family tree?
A. There are two categories of individuals hidden from view in the family tree—those Living and those Private.
Individuals are marked Living by the software based on their death date. However, there are many individuals in the tree missing their birth or death dates, or both. In that case, these rules are applied:
(a) if their record does not contain both birth and death dates, they are assumed to be Living,
(b) if their record contains a birth date, but not a death date, they are assumed Deceased if older than 110 years of age based on their birth date.
For individuals clearly Deceased (they appear in the tree more than several generations ago) but for which no birth and death dates have been determined, we have begun arbitrarily entering a death date of Bef. 2010 in order to make them appear as deceased. We are slowly working our way through the tree updating the birth and/or death dates for this case.
Individuals are marked Private if they are Deceased and have not been deceased for at least 7 years. This is an arbitrary decision to temporarily protect their identity.
Note: This concept of Living and Deceased, which is obvious to most of us, will be the topic of a future genealogy post. We were surprised to learn that the standard file format for family trees—GEDCOM—does not contain the fact of whether an individual is Living or Deceased. So genealogy software applications each have to implement rules like those described above. So if we mark an individual as Deceased on Ancestry.com but do not enter a death date for them, and we then export the family tree to another application, the Deceased fact is lost and that other application determines whether the individual is Living or Deceased based on its own rules.
Q. But I’m family. Can I please see the hidden individuals?
A. To see the Living individuals, you must register for a user account. Read here about user accounts.
The Private individuals will remain hidden. Contact us for more information.
Q. How Do I Create a User Account?
A. This website requires registration for user accounts associated with two different areas of content:
- Discovering Our Family History—register here for a Family & Friends Membership to gain access to private blog content, and to comment on blog posts.
- Climb Our Family Tree—register here to view Living individuals in the family tree.
Two separate accounts are necessary because these areas of the website use two different software applications (WordPress for the blog, and The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding for the family tree), and these applications unfortunately do not currently share login credentials. You are encouraged to register for these two accounts with the same user name and password to simplify things.
Important notes:
- You can register for one, both, or neither of these accounts—it is up to you.
- If you change the password of one user account, it will not change the password of the other account.
Q. If I see a mistake in the family tree information, can I correct it?
A. Mistakes?! Well, we have too many of those to count. Yes, please help correct our mistake.
The information page for each individual has a Suggest tab that allows you to send corrections or comments to us. We’ll review your information and update the Ancestry.com tree as appropriate. That information, if incorporated, will appear in the family tree on this website in a future download from Ancestry.com.
Q. Where can I find issues of the ten Krazy Ken’s Kin Knewsletter published in 2017?
A. After you register for a Family & Friends Membership and are accepted, you can access them in this post.
Q. What does not work yet?
A. Well, we’re not totally sure! Here is what we know about:
Find > Search Site will not work until Google has indexed the new genealogy portion of the website.This is now working.- Find > Cemeteries and Media > Headstones have not yet been populated with headstones (see #3 below).
- Media > Photos and all other similar places that would display photos or other documents have not yet been populated with photos and documents. These must be downloaded from Ancestry.com and uploaded to this website. That’s for another day.
Mobile Mode, which is the layout used for smaller devices like iPhones, has not yet been customized for this website. Pages may therefore not look good or even be usable.This is now working.
(10 May 2018)