Policies the Family Search website has on "masking" records and problems it may cause you as a researcher
By Chris Mills
I have been using the Family Search website for several years. I became disenchanted with Ancestry.com (not so much because of the cost of using it but because I decided Ancestry and their affiliated corporate entities were trying to buy up too many of the free online resources on the web and put them behind paywalls). So it wasn't because I disliked the Ancestry interface or had a problem with their databases, it was for political reasons that I stopped using their site.
Since I am not a member of the LDS church I do not have access to everything on the site, but considering that it is a free site it does have an amazing amount of resources available. Once the Covid-19 "pandemic" is over I should be able to go into one of the local family history centers again if there is anything on the site that I need more access to.
Since I am doing a lot of genealogical research, I have made a fair number of contributions to the site. According to my statistics page, I have added 2300 people over the last four years and attached over 25,000 sources to people records. I have actually created more people than that but since the duplicate checking logic seems to be a bit weak I have sometimes had to merge my newly created people into existing records. Another thing I do a lot is merging duplicate records other people have created together. I don't think that is being tracked on my statistics page, but I would guess I have merged literally thousands of duplicate records together. As I mentioned above, the duplicate checking is a bit weak, and the site does allow you to create records with almost no information, which almost invariably leads to duplicates being created.
Don't get me wrong. I love the site, and I'm going to continue using it. However, recently I noticed something that disturbed me, and I went to get it out in the open and talk about it while it's on my mind.
A few months ago I found out that the writer C. S. Forester was buried in Orange County, California, and I added him to a database that I have set up to track a lot of dead people I've found. I was shocked to find out there was no record for him in Family Search, so I added one. There were plenty of sources for him, so it wasn't that difficult to "flesh out" his record, as it were.
However, right after I created his record, I noticed something that bothered me. Even though C. S. Forester was a public figure (he wrote the Horatio Hornblower books, among others) and had died in the 1960s, the Family Search database was masking his record, i.e., marking it as private, which meant only I could see it.
There are good reasons for masking certain records. Among other reasons, records for living people should always be masked, since having their specific information online could lead to identity theft or other similar problems. I get that and I approve of it. In fact, I have found several people who were marked as dead who were alive and I have asked for those records to be marked private, which they have been. But why in God's name was the record for someone like C. S. Forester being masked?
Not knowing what the heck was going on, I sent a message to Family Search through their internal system and asked about the record. This is what I got back:
"Thank you for contacting FamilySearch Support and bringing your concern to our attention. The yellow banner is displayed on this record because your ancestors' records are considered confidential. FamilySearch is sensitive to certain localities of birth, marriage, and death because of political or religious beliefs of the people in those areas."
That reply contained the answer. C. S. Forester was a British subject. He was born in Egypt because his parents were living there at the time of his birth. He was not Egyptian and never would have considered himself as an Egyptian, but rather an Englishman who was born in Egypt. (He moved to the United States in the late 1930s or 1940s, but I don't know if he ever changed his citizenship from British to American).
I sent another message to Family Search:
"C S Forester was a British citizen of English parentage, the fact that he was born in Egypt has no bearing on his religion or ethnicity. As far as I know he was Church of England. Your automatic filter (and I know it wasn't a human who did this as it was immediate when I entered the record) has erred in trying to "protect" his record. He was a public figure and a well known writer, so it's not like the information isn't out there; he wrote "The African Queen" and the Horatio Hornblower books, and there is a Wikipedia article on him (see below):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Forester
Please mark his record as a public record. If the person reading this has no authority to do so please let me know who I need to contact to get this resolved."
Within a day or two of that message being sent I received another message back from family search stating that the record for C S Forester was now in the public space. That was a good thing, but having to jump through so many hoops to get his record marked as public just because of his birthplace was not a good thing.
I recently added someone to Family Search who was of Armenian ethnicity who was born in Turkey. Surprise, surprise, his record is also marked as private. And when I checked my contributions just now, I found another record which I created three years ago for someone else who was born in Turkey, and I see now that person's record is also marked as private.
The common thread I am seeing here is that these people were all born in countries where the majority religion is Islam so the majority of the population are Muslims. I also understand that people of other religions can be discriminated against or persecuted because of their religions. I know the Armenian guy I put into family search would have been fully aware of that, as would have been his family, considering the Armenian genocide was committed on the soil of Ottoman Turkey.
Given that these particular people I was looking at all died over 50 years ago, I am not certain what the point of this "masking" is. Yes, having this information in a public forum could lead to "outing" other members of their families to people who might wish them harm. But the public information was out there before I created the records for these people, all I did was create a frame to drape the information on.
Essentially, this is a form of discrimination. And it is a slippery slope for Family Search to go down. Do they want to start flagging records of people born in Germany before 1933 as protected because of the Holocaust? Do they want to start masking records of people born in Poland in the same time period because they might be ethnic Germans who were expelled by the Russians in 1945? Do they want to start masking records of people born in Belarus or Ukraine or any of the other ex Soviet republics because of the purges of Josef Stalin? Where exactly does this end?
One of Family Search's strengths (and one of its great advantages over other sites such as Ancestry) is that the site is collaborative. As other contributors find more information or notice that certain things are wrong or incomplete, they can update records and make the entire site more accurate. The "masking" that Family Search is doing on these records is short circuiting that process for these people.
In the case of the Armenian gentleman I just entered recently, I am going to copy all the information from Family Search into the database that I created so there is a public place for the information to be found. Once that's done I can either ignore his family search record or I can delete the record. Since I am the only person allowed to make edits on it (therefore the only person who edited the record, which means I should be able to delete it), there is no technical reason for me not to be able to delete the record. I just need to give a reason statement, and if I do so I will simply say that their marking the record as confidential renders it absolutely useless and why waste the storage space on their system for useless records.
In the case of C S Forester I pointed out to them that he wasn't actually Egyptian, and he was a public figure. That is not the case for the two people I created who were born in Turkey. I have used Family Search because it is free, and it works. I am not going to bother jumping through a bunch of hoops to make an end run around this thing, or attempt to lobby them to change a policy they have made which I believe to be a mistake and wrong-headed on the face of it. I am not privy to the thought processes behind this decision, and this article is the only attempt I am making to even question it.
I'm not going to stop using Family Search over this, it's still a great resource. But I am going to think twice before using it to research anyone born in any of these countries that may be subject to these fairly arbitrary and capricious "masking" policies.
Page created 31 August 2020
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© 2020 by Christopher Mills