Genealogy Chat

Update! Thanks Kim. You said all yours had been removed after a while. Well mine have all gone from Ancestry today! Someone told me and I checked. So thank you Ancestry and thank you all on here for permitting me to let off steam and have a MOAN . I guess I over-reacted..... and yes! I take on board all your varying viewpoints. We are all different and each is entitled to his/ her opinion. Thank you all anyway. You were there when I needed some support.

Update! Thanks Kim. You said all yours had been removed after a while. Well mine have all gone from Ancestry today! Someone told me and I checked. So thank you Ancestry and thank you all on here for permitting me to let off steam and have a MOAN . I guess I over-reacted..... and yes! I take on board all your varying viewpoints. We are all different and each is entitled to his/ her opinion. Thank you all anyway. You were there when I needed some support.

Hi all - too many names to individually agree/reply to BUT - I joined Ancestry in order to search, print census info. and the BMD lookups not for putting my tree onto - I had purchased the FTM @ £29 it's hardly a fortune compared to what we pay in trips to offices and certs - also hopefully at one point in the future I can cancel my Ancestry subs. when I feel I will only need the odd look up I can go to local library, at the mo still fairly new so have only done main line, not checked out all siblings but when these changes happened I was one of the 'moaners' on about the loss of certain bits and I queried WHY do we need a tree on Ancestry - I personally think they want to offer similar service as GR - but the ancestry connection is not as easy or friendly as it is on GR and I still say WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR TREE WHEN YOU WANT TO LEAVE ANCESTRY?? Surely you will need a full sub. to conitnue to use it - , the One world Tree has been on there for ages but that's for peops. who chose to put it on now there are loads and loads of same names showing Living XXXX private tree, it just makes the searching long winded - there are loads of ways to contact others and it seems to have worked for many before these changes and just to end - I'm so glad I didn't bother to put my info onto Ancestry seeing all the problems many are having. Gill :))

If the only information that appears about a person in a GR tree is their name, with no dates/places, but links to other people, does this identify them for the purposes of Data Protection principles. I am quite comfortable with the idea of being courteous enough to ask a new contact whether they object to inclusion, but it is not practical to then separately ask spouses, parents and children individually. Usually the information that identifies someone's birth and their connection to their parents is readily available from the GRO indices anyway - GRO makes this information available about ME, but I have never given permission. One of my 'interests' in researching my family is to uncover the skeletons and naughty bits, and I have a couple of cousins who do not want to talk about, or share any information about their family 'shame'. That about trebled my efforts to find the truth, cost me money and a good deal of time. The mere fact that descendants exist is a matter of public record, and I struggle to see that I am invading anyone's privacy in including them in my tree - their existence isn't private in the first place.

Here is some information about the Data Protection Acts which people may find useful. You will notice there is no direct mention mention of privacy. The Data Protection Act 1998 came into force on 1 March 2000. Under the Data Protection Act, anyone processing personal information must comply with eight principles of good information handling. The eight principles state that the data must be: * fairly and lawfully processed; * processed for limited purposes; * adequate, relevant and not excessive; * accurate and up to date; * not kept longer than necessary; * processed in accordance with the individual's rights; * secure; * not transferred to countries outside the European Economic area, unless there is adequate protection. GR puts tho onus on the poster of the information to ensure the terms of the act are complied with, and in addition requires that living persons must give prior permission. Prior permission is not necessarily a pre-requisite, it is just a safeguard to prevent living persons attempting to bring a case under the DPA. There is of course no practical way of checking if a person has given permission unless someone complains when you have to assume that they have not. The problem with sites like Ancestry is that the may be operating under a different legal framework.

Judy!!!! Haven't seen you around for ages, how are you doing? Anyway, if that is what Ancestry are doing, it's a load of cr*p! On IGI there is a guy with the same name as my 4xgrandfather and born in the same year, but born in Minnesota! They are 2 different people for gawd's sake! Ok,moan over. Bev x

Bev....I think I read somewhere in the Ancestry babble that the site 'merges' different poster's information in order to better able researchers to look at a lot of information in one place....apparently they haven't perfected it....LOL! Judy

Changing the subject slightly - have you actually looked at the information on Ancestry One World Trees? (Present company excepted of course) some of it is total twaddle - in fact it's beyond twaddle - it's a joke! I have my 4xgreat grandfather marrying the right person and producing 2 children in Suffolk (in fact he had 7 in Suffolk) According to the Ancestry Tree, 3 months after producing his 2nd child in Suffolk he manages to marry a lady in Minnesota and produce another 3 children! And his father - they've got the right name and right place, but have a man born 120 years earlier! I don't think so!!!! Bev x

Ann I did not mean I expected something from every contact I have just that I would be annoyed if somebody used ALL my info without sharing something at least, because that would be very ungracious .I have shared info with people who have just started and I know more about their family than they do, so its nice to give them stuff they didnt know.I just think its not worth getting all upset about it .

Ann from Sussex, That is really scary! I shall be very wary from now on and shall stick to my a4 notebooks, pen, folders and bits of paper from now on. Eileen( was it),? Thanks for the messgae about them (ANC) taking the name off eventually. That made me feel a whole lot more cheerful. If it wasn't Eileen well thanks whoever it was. Thank you all for helping me. M

Peter When I said privacy laws I was using the term generally. From my limited understanding of the Data Protection Acts, you cannot publish identifying information about living people in a public forum without their permission. Permission is given either by default, e.g. your listing in the phone book, or individually and particularly by the person whose privacy it is.So if you give me permission to make identifying information public about you, Peter, I cannot pass that permission onto someone else - you have to give your permission to THEM. Hope that makes sense. In this case, Ancestry (nor GR) do not have permission to publish details of living people in an identifying way unless that person has given THEM (via you, it is assumed) that permission. This is what worried me in the first place about the Ancestry Tree and is why I did not put mine on there. Although I do not mind my long dead relatives being in some vast data base, I do mind my living rellies being on there. OC

Peter, I wasn't posting a tree. Do you have a sub. to Ancestry? If so surely you have saved people you have found to the MY Ancestry section(which is for one's own private use). They recently changed this to allow putting those same names into a personal tree. It is to help you build your tree... just like one does on Genes and you then choose whether to allow others to view or not. I chose to keep mine private. Were I to upload or offload (or whatever it is) a gedcom file to Ancestry world tree or world connect or some such then YES it would be in the knowledge that anyone could view it. I did not choose this. M

yes Hazel, They DID do that! And I think it is horrid. Gordon! I have read all that now! It is not made obvious initially. The fact is that the personal tree is a replacement for 'My Ancestry' , in which one stores ones names and no one has access to it, It is a CON. trick and nothing less. They did not have all those names before I started my research I have spent three years on it. Anne from Sussex, Thank you for the phone no. I will try tomorrow. Will tell you what they say. Valerie. I wish.... (and I wish I'd never started too!) I don't mind sharing any info but I do object to it being used without my consent.... and my dead brother's name is of no interest whatever to any but me and his family... who may well be as shocked to see it as I was. I hope they never do .It was in a list that was not even his surname. So others be warned!

I took off my tree it took abot 3 weeks to disappear completely. This was off of Ancestry, I took it off because mostly it was wrong and previously it had hidden living rellies and then suddenly they all appeared. Kim

Can I just ask, why bother posting your tree on a web site if you don't want anyone else to see it? I dosn't make sense. OC also mentions privacy laws. We don't have any as such. We do have the Data Protection Acts, which are concerned with the 'Fair' use of data held on computer databases.

am I the only one who doesnt mind people sharing my info after all thats how I got so far because of people who I have been in contact with, I have found so many rellies I am really pleased , especially living ones I lost contact with years ago.I would be annoyed if someone copied all my details without at least giving something back and as long as they dont use my children I really couldnt care less.

From the Ancestry FAQ: Question: What will Ancestry do with my Personal Member Tree information? Marking your Tree as 'personal' will make your tree 'Personal' so that it can't be viewed as a Public Member Tree, and withholds your tree information from being compiled in OneWorldTree. What does this mean? * Even if you don't share your tree, other members can still learn if a specific deceased individual is in your tree, in addition to the birth year and birthplace of the person and your username (but no personal information about you). * They can then contact you anonymously through Ancestry's Connection Service to request more information. Keep in mind that members who want to learn from your tree may also have helpful information about your tree to offer you in exchange. _____________________________ I know this is after the fact, but it always pays to check the small print. Or indeed the large print. The reason that you are still seeing the details of people on your tree is because when you search on Ancestry, (or any other database) you don't search the records, you search the index. Index entries for your tree are created when you make the full entries. So the records you entered are gone, but the index records are not... yet. It is probable that the index will be updated occasionally, thinning out the links to dead entries, thus helping speed up searches. When this will happen I don't know, but I would expect a proffesional company to re-index on a regular basis. regards, Gordon

hi marie, i've just read your thread and thought no they would'nt do that , so put in my james pope and there it is for everyone to see , after being told that it would be private and all the family is there as well as j pope hazel.

Ann, How do I complain to Ancestry. Phone? M

Thanks all for the support and advice. Gwen, I will try that. Keep your fingers crossed. O.C I assumed names disappeared from a Genes tree if one deletes one's tree. I will have to check! Off to see if there's anything left of the Christmas whisky. M