Transferring account ownership or cloning trees across accounts

#1

Thinking many years ahead, I hope, but it would be nice if there was a way to transfer full ownership/control of an account and the trees in it to another family member. There should be a way to pass all the work one has done onto someone else and it would be a feature I don’t think any of the other commercial sites offer yet.

An alternate approach might be to add support for cloning trees, preserving the media and everything else, across accounts. It would be a separate permission you would grant them, one level higher then edit.

#2

There’s currently a way for me to transfer tree ownership from one person to another in the back-end, so if someone requests it I can do it, but there’s no way yet for people to do it themselves. It’s planned though.

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#3

One feature of FamilyTreeDNA settings is “Beneficiary Information.” Having something like that here would add one more layer of protection to our personal information and trees. It asks for name, Phone # and email.

New member here looking to learn enough to make this my main tree repository.

#4

That’s a good idea. I’ve been thinking about something like this too. Realistically it’s unlikely to make it into RootsFinder in the near future. But I’ll add transferring account ownership to another RootsFinder user sometime in the next two months.

#5

This is something I’m very interested in too. RootsFinder is an excellent tool for working together collaboratively but at the end of the day there is only one owner and the collaborator has less power. I have separately asked that a person with edit access should be able to export GEDCOM of the tree. That as a minimum ensures that a collaborator can obtain their own copy of a tree in the event of the death of the owner. Obviously transferring ownership is only useful while the owner is alive, so having something in the line of ‘beneficiary’ is an alternative. A simple option when trees are already shared may be to have more than one owner for the tree, or perhaps a secondary owner who can claim full owner rights at some time when needed.

It’s obviously a bit complex but the simple aim in my mind is to be able to pass ownership from one person to another either in life or afterwards.

A workaround is to have a tree owned by an independent user account that can be ‘owned’ by more than one person but that starts to involve more subscriptions etc etc. We have done that for some trees that are managed by a family history committee where it is worthwhile, but not so practical for individuals.

#6

These ideas seem reasonable. I’ll look into multiple owners or a “can become owner” level between editor and owner to see which is simpler to add.

#7

Thanks Dallan. Sounds promising.