Exclude Living People

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Oct 31, 2007 6:56 am

Originally posted by guyholmes

Hi Keith,

I upload my Gedcoms from iFamily into Ancestry.com and GenesReunited but often get family members and contacts asking to be excluded - Worries about identity theft and just too much info being in the public domain.

Can we get an option during the Gedcom edit process to 'De-Personalise' living people where the program will remove the given names of people known to be living or less than 100 years old for example ??

This will save me having to go through the database afterwards removing all my cousins, their children etc !!

Cheers

Guy

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Oct 31, 2007 9:08 am

Hi Guy

I am sending you V2.287 that has an option to exclude living people from the exported Gedcom file. The rules to determine if a person is living are:

IF deathDate = " Y"
OR IF deathYear exists
OR IF (deathYear does not exist AND person would be 100 today)
THEN the person is NOT LIVING
ELSE
the person is LIVING

You will notice that a person who has no death date and would be = 100 years old today will default to be LIVING.

The calculation get a little more complex when a person has no birth or death years entered in the database. If these people get through and you know they are dead then simply enter their death date as Y (for Yes) and rerun the Gedcom export.

Keith

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:36 am

Originally posted by guyholmes

Wow - Even for you that was quick !!!

Yep, tried it and it works just fine. Exported my tree of 900 individuals and it sifted through them very well. As you say, there were a few entries (mostly very old ones) that were just a name with no birth or death date. In order to search through my database to find these people, I found by looking at the Index of individuals, you could not sort by birth date as you can by name or ID number, but you could do a Birth date = {Space}. That would bring up some of the entries without a birthdate.

In order to get all of them, I found the best way was in the Compare and Merge screen where you can sort by birth year and this clearly showed individuals that had been entered onto the database without a birth year, and I've amended these with either an approximate date, or as you said, entered a 'Y' in the date of death field.

Thanks for your quick response - Works great - I'll keep playing !

Guy

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Oct 31, 2007 11:19 am

Hi Guy

In the People Index I think what you need to do is enter

BirthYear =0 and DeathYear = 0

Does that work?

The correct thing is maybe to add another option in the new Reports - Data Inconsistencies Report

Keith

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:59 am

Originally posted by guyholmes

Hi Keith,

Just thinking back over this one in response to a friend telling me how identity thieves are stealing info from genealogy websites. I know you changed the gedcom export options to 'exclude living people' and this is what I do when posting to a couple of sites. But I do find that this loses the tree structure as all of the more recent members of the family aren't on it, so it is a bit tricky to navigate around.

Would it be possible to have an option to 'De-personalise Living People' with much the same configuration as before, but instead of excluding living people entirely, it could keep them physically in the tree but replace their personal information with generic text. Perhaps the user could decide how much information to display, ie. 'Replace name with ............ Living Person, Living Surname, First Name Living. And Replace Date of Birth with........... 'Month Year' or 'Year' or 'Exclude'.

I think this would be better than the current options to exclude people entirely, and shouldn't be too much more complicated ?? (He said hopefully !!!)

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:08 am

Originally posted by JackHenry

Just a thought on this.

If you exclude all of the information except the name, will that alliviate identity theft worries. If the name & surname is included, it will allow the tree to be fully readable, but stop information of concern being included.

As I said, just a thought.

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:27 am

Originally posted by curriouscat

I agree fully with Keith's original plan here. Privacy protection must come in front of a need to navigate a tree easily. The people whose names would be displayed may have no knowledge that their information and relationships are being displayed willy-nilly for some convenience of others. In my opinion that is a very weak reason to include names of living people.

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:19 pm

Originally posted by guyholmes

As I said- I don't necessarily want to include their names. They will simply be included in the tree as 'Living Person' or Living Person b1944. In this way, security is not weakened but the tree stands intact with all members included although some will meerly have a physical 'placeholder' in the tree.

By excluding living people, the tree has no root, and the first 3 generations do not appear, leaving generations further back as slightly isolated clusters of family groups with no direct link between them. I feel that the 'de-personalising' route offers the best of both worlds.

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Sat Aug 23, 2008 6:51 am

guyholmes wrote:As I said- I don't necessarily want to include their names. They will simply be included in the tree as 'Living Person' or Living Person b1944. In this way, security is not weakened but the tree stands intact with all members included although some will meerly have a physical 'placeholder' in the tree.

By excluding living people, the tree has no root, and the first 3 generations do not appear, leaving generations further back as slightly isolated clusters of family groups with no direct link between them. I feel that the 'de-personalising' route offers the best of both worlds.
Hi Guy

V2.431 - added an option to " Depersonalize Living People" in Gedcom export as a sub-option of " Include Living People" .

Keith

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:38 pm

Originally posted by Neville

:) The de-personalise options for GEDCOM are great.
I think the same options would useful in html webpage creation.
(There's no end to our ideas!)
Neville

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Keith Wilson
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Exclude Living People

Post by Keith Wilson » Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:48 pm

Neville wrote: :) The de-personalise options for GEDCOM are great. I think the same options would useful in html webpage creation. (There's no end to our ideas!) Neville
Please keep the ideas flowing. A great idea - (I thought it too and I sort of knew someone our there would ask for it) :(

V2.446 - added a de-personalise option to HTML web page generation in addition to the existing Exclude Living and Recently Dead options.

Keith

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