Genealogy Chat

Please be careful what you let people see in your tree and what information you give people. See Below

Hi Christine, Have you added your message & it's been removed or are you still typing?

I had a very spooky contact on Genes this week. He asked me to send him a personal email which I did. He sent me an attachment which was my family in a word document which he had done. The information which he had was very in depth a lot which is not even in my tree. I asked where he had got it and he said he only lived a short distance from Warwick records office and he used IGI, Ancestry and 1837, but some of the information he could not get from there. Kike my daughters adoptive name. It really spooked me especially seeing he is not a direct relative, he is related to my GT Grandmother's first Husband. I have since changed my tree so that living relatives are not shown and I would advise everyone else to do the same. It still does not answer where he got his information from though. Christine

Hi He probably did get it from records office. I have gone to my local one and you get all records on Scotland. Marion

For the same reason i never give access to anyone apart from very close rellies, if i get a contact that wants info then after i am sure they are related i just give them the relevant info. Roy

Marion yes I know you can get most records from the records office but surely you can only get registered names not adoptive names. I thought these were only available to close relatives. Christine

I would ask him again where he got it from. Marion

I did ask him but the only reply I got was what I put in my first message I have asked him to take my family off his tree which he has done. Christine

One of the more sinister uses of this site is to search for individuals by partial names and ranges of dates that you expect to be connected to a person you have already contacted. If you get a match (even if you don't know what the full name is) the fact that your existing contact is listed against the name means you have scored a hit. Cross-referring with the GRO and other readily available data sources is easy, and you can build a very accurate replica of someone's tree (possibly with more information than they have themselves) in just a few minutes, if you are determined enough. One of the disadvantages of using the 'Hide living relatives' option recently introduced is that while the name is replaced with 'Living Relative', the dates and places, together with notes (if any), remain. It doesn't take much work to find the names if you want to. Ironically, the very people who use this site are also the people best equipped to reconstruct the missing data - it is what we are good at.

I dont have any living rellies on my tree, not even me as I use my 'internet name' of Ellen Proctor with good cause. If people are connected to my tree they will know enough about the 'past' rellies to contact me, they dont need my name or my present family. Ellen X

Just to point out there are many other sources of data including the electorial records etc etc