I have just run a search for people in RM9 with criteria living flag true and death event present true and found a lot. I have not quite got to the bottom of all the reasons for this, but one of them is clearly a bug in treeshare.
I picked a random living person in my main tree
When I added a death date in Ancestry (which I did by adding a death event, rather than from the quick edit screen), Ancestry automatically set the living? flag to deceased
Of course, this person appeared as changed in Treeshare
Note that the death events appears, but that there is no option to update the person details, which include the living? flag.
After adding the death event via treeshare, it naturally appears in RM, but the living flag is still set to yes
If I then delete the death event from both sides and this time set the living? flag to deceased on Ancestryâs quick edit screen, then the person still appears as changed, but there is still no option to update the person details or otherwise transfer the changed living flag to RM. The same thing happens if I update the flag in RM.
If I start with the same person, living in both databases, and add a death event in RM, it logically sets the living? flag to no.
The same person appears as changed in Treeshare, with the new death event to transfer, but still no option to update the person details
However, working this way round, Ancestry properly infers that the person must have died and updates the flag accordingly
Plainly, this is a bug in Treeshare.
However, there is at least one aspect of this that I donât yet understand. Working through the results of my search, some of the people concerned are set as living in Ancestry despite having a death event there; Ancestry then suppresses the death date, for example on its main profile and gives you a warning message on the main edit person screen. It should be impossible to arrive at this situation and I donât yet know how it arose. Perhaps it was the result of a merger, but I have no record to confirm this.
Please could RM log the bug for development to put on the list.
Any ideas on how the corrupt data in Ancestry arose would be most welcome.