It's unlikely that the parents were born before 1869, so the obviously wrong dates can't be chalked up to a conspiracy to avoid making the profiles Open.
Without seeing the profiles, I would guess that the "1910s to 1910s" life dates for the father result from somebody's rigid notion that the date fields should only display dates that are determinable from records. If the only record with a date is Richard's birth in 1918, they may have entered "before 1918" as a birth date and "after 1918" as a death date. It would make far more sense to enter a guesstimated, but realistic, year of birth and leave the death date blank.
I've seen a number of profiles here for people who supposedly are parents of six or eight children, but because the only known date is a date for a marriage in (say) 1720, the profile shows a birth date of before 1720 and a death date of after 1720 -- and duplicate profiles have been created because the dates are so far off from reality that no one thought to look to see if this was the same person they were planning to add.
