General Chat

I, too, go along with Peter and Sue!

On my tree I only have the direct line and siblings. I do not have siblings spouses or children. Still my tree has reach an amazing size, 7100 people.

Sometimes, I get messages from a descendant of a sibling, so I can't really help them, except to go further back, if I have it. I do ask questions to make sure that it is legitimate.

If the only information I have is of the parents, I do not open my tree. I just send a message with the info I do have. My tree is only open to about 20 people.

Lindy

just as a footnote....

I contacted the person who asked for my tree.
They gave me full details of the person they were searching for (it was a Hot Match). I checked my tree but there was no connection. If I had given them access when they originally asked it would have been unnecessary and I don't think they would have told me there was no connection.
Admittedly no harm done, but the best solution would have been to ask about the connection in the first place rather than access to my tree!

Sandra

I stupidly sent two A3 sheets full of my family tree to a person who had contacted me re. my g. grandmother. What he did was copy 150 names onto his tree on GR. Most of these people were nothing to do with him. He even added 16 living people and I had to threaten to see a solicitor before he had them removed (by GR)He has over 28,000 people in his tree. How can this be possible? He must be someone who doesn't take his tree seriously and is just out to steal other peoples trees to see how many he can get.Pam

I don't approve of what this person did to you Pam. I'm sorry that you have had this unpleasant experience.

Unless someone is a really close relation, and has become the sort of friendly contact you might exchange Christmas cards with, then giving them information about living people on your tree isn't a good idea (as you found).

That contact must have been building up his tree for some time so ought by now to have learned that adding living people without their permission is wrong but unfortunately there are selfish people who don't care about rules or etiquette.

However don't automatically assume that a tree of many thousands means someone who doesn't care. There are people on GR who are building huge databases of connections and generally on the Internet there are many websites with similarly enormous trees. Sometimes they owe more to imagination than research but there are some very careful databases which can be extremely helpful to other researchers.

When this site started it was called Genesconnected and for a short time it was actually possible to join a tree to that of a contact on site. I don't think that the site owners had fully thought out the pitfalls of everyone having access to every contact's full tree but maybe some long time members who never come onto the discussion boards still think that joining up every tree they can is the point of belonging.

Sue

I work from a very simple point of view.....

If I would like some info off someone else's tree I ask if I may copy the relevant bits and then I check what i can anyway.

If someone wants to copy the whole of my tree its entirely upto them. I have done what I have done for my own benefit and enjoment and if they want to benefit from my work and money spent so what?

To me, its all about sharing. Some peeps are polite about it some are not but there are a lot worse things in life to worry about.

Be happy

Gerry :-))

I totally agree Gerry.

It amuses me when people complain bitterly that their trees have been "stolen". Anyone copying any information hasn't taken it away. Anyone copying any details of names or dates from a GR tree won't be seeing the census details, certificate details or any other backup proof to go with the information.

My GR tree has names, year of birth and place of birth only, with no living people named on the tree and unnecessary siblings left off. Anyone copying my tree would have to collect their own proofs if wished.

It certainly wouldn't bother me if someone copied chunks of my tree because I am the one who knows the family details about the names. I know the family legends and I have the photos and original documents which make the whole thing interesting.

I've seen this same complaint over and over again in the years I've belonged to the site (and I've been here since it started). While not true of everyone and possibly not in the cases we have seen this week, it seems to me that the majority of people worrying themselves about their trees being stolen tend to be ones who are fairly new to family history and whose trees are often at an early stage.

I appreciate that this is an expensive hobby and that people will have saved up to buy certificates and made special trips to visit Records Offices over time. However in my experience of many years of doing family history/genealogy I have been given as much as I have let others have.
Over the years I have sent printouts of trees, copies of CDs full of information and copies of photos to confirmed contacts. I have made active efforts to find people who share some of my more unusual surnames and I've created online groups where we meet and discuss our findings on those families. One of my groups now has over 60 members all researching one surname and our whole purpose is the sharing of information and attempting to join up the small family groups.
In return people from many countries have sent me documents, photos and information freely and cheerfully.

If people don't want to share their whole trees then no-one is forcing them to do so. It's not easy looking at someone else's tree on GR anyway and if I find a new contact I'd prefer them just to tell me how they think the connection works rather than letting me browse around on an unfamiliar tree.

I do understand how very involved you can get in the lives of ancestors and when you've spent perhaps years looking for them it is easy to forget that they were there all the time and don't actually belong to you. I get real pleasure from surprising people with some of the discoveries I've made or which were shown to me. It's fun making contacts and finding relations all over the world.

Sue
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I concur with you Sue.
I can only say that if it wasn't for people like Sue, I wouldn't have been pointed in the right direction when I was at a standstill in my tree.
The whole thing, for me, is about sharing information. If I can help someone, I will and I hope for the same consideration in return.
Having said that, however, I do not put the names of living relatives on GR and I do not put any references of anyone on there, either. All personal information is put on my own Family Tree Maker.
While I'm here, a big THANK YOU, Sue for helping me - I'm still waiting for the certificate and will pm you as soon as it arrives.
Sue

You are very welcome Sue!

I've just had fun sorting my Hot Matches. Having weeded out dozens of matches to early medievals like John of Gaunt, I am delighted to find several possible closer links.
One of them is the name of somebody who is the son of an ancestral aunt of mine. If that contact is a direct descendant of that matched individual then I am going to make someone very happy because that is my line which leads right back to William the Conqueror and beyond, plus royals and nobility all over Europe.

If that contact is a genuine blood relation I am about to increase his family tree by about 20,000 individuals.

So those of you who don't like sharing........do I keep quiet and not tell him or do I show him how it works and change how he sees family history forever? LOL
I know what I will do and I am excited and hoping he does have a blood link because I can remember how thrilling this was when someone showed me.

Sue
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I do some look-ups and I am suprised, no shocked, that people readily open their trees to me with all their names on show, I do advise them to switch the living rellies off,but some don't think its important?
Personally I think it is better to build your own tree elsewhere and only show key relatives on here.Also If you don,t want endless hot matches put a > or a * at the end of the name that stops daft matches. Luckily I've only had contact with lovely helpful people, of course there are the nasties, but I have'nt met any yet.
When you think one person in thirteen is related it's only reasonable that we share branches with many people and the information on our trees is in the public domain.therefore we don't own it.
I always say to contacts, help yourself, copy anything and if I've made any mistakes let me know!

I do not have living rellies in my tree but put living + surname. My tree does however start with my own name and as you are supose to ask to add anyone living was more than cross to see my name as a hot match. I let this man see my tree as I do like to help and hope for a scap of info I didn't have of course. I future I should talk more to find out what exactly their relationship is and give them only that whick is directly of use to them.

Although not perhaps directly connected to this issue, I sometimes think that when people get 'precious' about a particular ancestor (considering them to be ' their's ', they often forget the mathematics involved, which means that after only 3-4 generations, an individual from, say, 1800 can quite conceivably have hundreds, even thousands, of descendants alive today.

For example, an individual in 1800 with 8 children, each of whom had 7 children, each of those had 6, then 5, then, then 3 could conceivable have upwards of 5000 descendants (8x7x6x5x3).

Of course, it would be pretty unlikely that this might happen give deaths, breaks in the pattern of numbers of children, intermarriage of cousins etc but it does show how it's quite likely that your gr-gr-gr-grandfather is very far from being solely 'yours'.

Simon

Very true Simon.

That also doesn't allow for the times your GGG Grandfather might appear on someone else's tree as a sibling or cousin.

Some researchers like to take each line down as far as they can find them or to spread sideways as far as they can find information so not every tree on GR is going to have simply direct ancestors on it.

We all forget that people we have in our families may have different relationships to someone else. For example my great grandmother was called Ellen and known in my family as Little Nan. It's only been very recently that I made contact with someone who knew of her as Auntie Nellie. I'd never heard her referred to as that.

I also had a well loved great uncle whom I remembered as a very nice jolly man. I made a contact through GR with a relation of my uncle's estranged daughter. I don't know the details but some 60 years later this cousin of mine was still so upset by the breakup of her parents' marriage and the fact that her father took no more part in her life that she didn't want any contact with me and didn't want to know anything about her father's ancestry.

The same person can mean so many different things to different relations.

Sue
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