Living People in the FamilySearch Family Tree

Living people are handled differently than deceased people in the FamilySearch Family Tree. FamilySearch needs to protect the privacy of living people, but the records of deceased people can be made public.

This is not obvious when you look at the Tree views, although the Person views have a yellow banner. 

Records of living people can only be seen in the FamilySearch account where those records were created, 

This means that if you forget your username and password and create a new account, all of the living people you added in the first account will be hidden from the second account. Instead, use the "Forgot username or password" function on the Sign-in screen, to access your existing account..

This also means that there is no point in creating more than a minimum number of living records.

I can create records of my children and grandchildren, for my own use, but they cannot see them. 

This means that each user will see a different record for any living person, This is easily verified by the fact that they will have different ID numbers. 

For example:

My wife and I are both living. I can see myself and my wife when I look at Family Tree. She can see me and herself in Family Tree. But the records we see are different records with different ID numbers. And when our children see us in Family Tree each of them sees a different record ID for each of us. Why are there all of these duplicates? FamilySearch doesn't want duplicate records of deceased people, so why is it creating all of these duplicate records of living people? Because it guarantees the privacy of the living,

Sometimes you will want to merge duplicate records, but you are prevented from doing do, because one record is marked as Deceased and the other is marked as Living. Obviously one or the other has to be wrong. Correct the status that is incorrect, and then merge the records.

What do I do if I cannot see my ancestors, (or my spouse and my in-laws) in the FamilySearch Family Tree? 

The solution is to create records for the living people to connect you to the deceased people. Once you connect to an existing record of a deceased person, all of their deceased ancestors will be shown as connected to you.

For example:

Mary and John have been married for over a year. Mary is troubled by the fact that John and his ancestors are not shown when she looks at the Family Tree. But when John looks at Family Tree on his computer, he sees many generations of his ancestors, as well as Mary and her ancestors. John vaguely remembers that Mary's sister Amy asked if she could sign into his account as a helper. He thinks that Amy added information to his account, but he has no idea how she did it. What can they do?

They could always get help from a Temple and Family History Consultant. That's Amy's calling, and they are sure she would be glad to help. But Amy just left on a 2-week cruise.

Instead, they call the free help line 1-866-406-1830. Mary is asked to sign in her FamilySearch account. She is asked to create a new record for John. Then she is asked whether John's parents are living, They are, so Mary is asked to create new records for both of them. Mary asks if she can just add them to her tree by pasting in the ID numbers shown in John's account. She is told that those records are hidden except in John's account, and that she will need to create new records for them. The same is true of John's grandparents, except that one grandfather is deceased. The deceased ancestors can be added by ID number or by Finding them. In 15 minutes, Mary can see John and his ancestors for many generations. It was time well spent. 

This process will connect you to ancestors who are already in the FamilySearch Family Tree. It will not find those who are not in the Family Tree. That becomes a research quest for another day.

I encourage you to watch this 3-minute video, which I just found. It illustrates the process beautifully. FamilySearch: When Your Family Tree Is Empty!