When should one create a profile for a living person?

Question

I have a general question prompted by a specific circumstance. The general question is: When is it appropriate to create a profile for a living person?

The particular situation is I have a family with four children, the parents and three of the four children have died, the fourth child, considerable younger than the other three, is still alive. How should I enter this family, in particular the youngest, still living, child?

This question has probably been asked and answered many times before, if so I apologize for asking it once again.

Answer 1

Hi Richard.  The rules changed a bit when the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union went into effect a year and a half ago.  Currently you cannot create a profile for a person under age 13 unless you are his/her parent.  If the living child is older than 13, you can create the profile, but it will be an Unlisted privacy profile (unless the child is a member of this site).  The name will not be visible to anyone not on the trusted list, and it will not show up in search results, but you can create it as a placeholder if you wish.  That's your call.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Privacy#Unlisted

Answer 2

Create profiles for the parents and deceased children, as usual. You should be a profile manager on all of these profiles.

Then add the living child as either a sibling of the deceased children or a child of the parents (either way, they'll get connected). If you leave the death date and place empty, the living child's profile will become "Unlisted," meaning that only you (the profile manager) can see the contents.

After you create the Unlisted profile, the privacy settings on the parents and siblings might change (to add privacy protection), so you may need to adjust those settings.

I've done this in a number of families in order to keep a record of the name and other details I have for the living family member(s).

Answer 3

The other answers have covered the "how". For the "when"/"if"/"should I?", my answer is: only if you need the profile to connect to another branch of deceased people. For example, if the still-living child has a deceased spouse and in-laws that you want to enter or connect to, then you can enter his/her profile as a placeholder or linking point. If you'd only be entering the profile so you can keep track of the person's birthday, do that offline, not on WikiTree.

Answer 4

I get that this was a "when" question, but I'll lean towards the "why" answer if I may.

Why should I (or should I not) create profiles of living persons for families that are not my own? Since the advent of the GDPR regulations as well as WikiTree's policy towards completely unlisting profiles that represent living persons, I would highly recommend "not" creating them unless you intend to manage them until that person dies.

Keep in mind that if this person is a relatively normal person, has no ties to any particular project, and you have created them, that you cannot abandon management of the profile. The system will not let you. If you are fortunate to find someone else who has an interest in that profile, you can pawn it off onto someone else, but it must always be owned or else it will be removed. Unlisted profiles cannot be simply "opened" later unless the person in the profile passes away.

There is a possibility that it may represent someone who is of interest to a project, in which case you can pawn it off onto the project account. However, now it becomes the responsibility of the project to manage and wait until the person passes away before they can release it due to the regulations.

So it creates a profile that no one can see except you, no one can edit but you, and can only be released when they pass away.

Answer 5

Thank you all for the answers