General Chat

I have often been asked a question that I just cannot answer. I have thought about it myself over the years....................why do a number of people post their Family Tree here on Genes, Ancestry and other sites when they don't want anyone to contact them? I'm not talking about those who don't reply to emails or messages
but those who do reply and make it quite clear they do not wish to share their Tree with you? I have been told of one Tree owner who actually went to the point of being untruthful to put an interested party off the scent. Why go to all the bother of loading your Tree here, there and everywhere and then keep it all a big secret? I don't understand.
Pete

I do believe that some people put their trees online because they do not have programmes on their computers to support a family tree.
Naive I know but I think that may be an explanation.

Yes, I believe that is so, but why don't they want to share their information ?

Ever heard of the term 'Name Collector'?

It's one thing to copy off sections the enquirer is related to but another when the whole tree is copied. It has happened!
In any event, the further someone gets from their 'trunk' - e.g. Grt grt aunt & descendants - the less likely they are to purchase supporting documents. That's how errors creep in.

I no longer open my tree, but do provide info on a requested branch.

Like Det I also do not open my tree, but if they can prove
a connection to me I will help them with information.

Pete, I no longer open my tree unless it is to cousins and other family members.

Here's why: a few years ago when neither my OH nor I were on Ancestry I let a cousin have copies of my great-grandmother's birth, marriage and death certificates. He asked if he could post copies on his Ancestry site and, knowing nothing much about Ancestry at the time, I agreed, thinking that it would help anyone who was researching our family.

When my OH joined Ancestry and I used his site, I discovered that several people had copied the certificates to their family trees which I did not mind at all because the more help the better. However, four people had copied them to the wrong person and to the wrong parents. While I contacted all of them, only two have corrected their mistakes. The other two have ignored my messages and their trees still show the wrong people attached to the certificates.

I'm always happy to share info, however not so happy to see it elsewhere online with mistakes added, for instance if I were to give the details of my great grand parents and then find them on another site added to an unconnected family who happen to have the same surname.

I don't have a tree on here, or on any public site. When I did I encountered a very belligerent person who insisted I share my tree with him, even though he would not say, when I politely asked several times, who he thought the connection was, or why he thought there was a connection at all, given that having looked at people on 'HIS' tree the only similarity between names was a someone born on a different continent.

It was not just that he was wrong it was that he was abusive in the extreme.
Of course most people are not like that.

People pay for their subs ( and their searches, and certs) , so they are entitled to use the tree facility as they wish.

One other reason may be that the tree is just a 'rough draft' and they don't want info that is not yet sourced and may be incorrect spread far and wide. :-)

I think your last para is very true Nyx. They would invite criticism and possibly abuse if others found any information they were still confirming was incorrect so why risk sharing? Personally I put a lot of information I find out about the person's life, illness etc in the notes that I wouldn't want to share.

You can provide details without sharing your tree in any case. Each should be able to use the site in a way that suits them, not how others seem to think they should use it. I can see your point Pete, but I have seen many ding dongs on here when people have shared their tree but don't like what happens when they do. People are people and will make mistakes with information, whether or not it comes from someone else's tree.

Like so many here, I do not open my tree on here or on ancestry to anyone.

I will share information on a branch but only after the person has proved to me that we do have a connection ........ ad I do not share photos, certificates etc. I do have a 2nd cousin who is always trying to get certain documentation on my father and mother ......... but I know it is likely to be passed on to someone else who has no connection to my side of the family but is a name collector.


I did once have a very small tree on ancestry ............. 2 people, my great aunt and her husband and put there until I found information about him. It had their names, gt aunt's birth year and husband's estimated birth year.

They emigrated to the US 2 days after their marriage in 1902, and the marriage certificate didn't provide much help in identifying the husband before the marriage.

Well, I forgot about it, hadn't made it private at the time .................... and suddenly I saw a leaf hint.

Someone had found it, and attached them to people of the same name in his tree.

The only problem is that my relatives were born about 70 years AFTER the children he'd attached them to

it was quite weird because the 2 couples apparently had the same names, came form the English county and had emigrated to the same place in the US .............. but about 90 years apart.


Fortunately, he was responsive to the message I left on his tree, and removed them as I asked.

I have a tree on here and on Ancestry. Both are private and there for ease of me storing information and checking and researching records. .I am quite willing to give information to anyone who has a definite close connection to me and who of course asks nicely . I too have been poached by name collectors in the past before getting my trees secured and one was very abusive when I asked her to delete my Dad's details which by the way she had totally wrong anyway. She told me it was me that had got his details wrong :-S :-S :-S. Yeah whatever :-P

Thanks for all your replies, so many reasons why not to share information. I really don't understand name collectors? seems an odd thing to do. How ridiculous to assume two people with exactly the same name are the same person. Perhaps no one has ever told these so called "researchers" that you should never assume your findings are correct unless you can prove it to be so?
Thank you,
Pete

What most researchers think of as proof and what the name collectors consider proof may be two very different things.

A few years ago I came across my recently deceased uncle on someone's tree but he was married to the wrong lady. I contacted the tree owner and politely explained that she had the wrong wife and I was sure because he was my uncle, I had known him all my life and I was at his wedding as a 4 year old and had the photos to prove it. I was also in close contact with his wife who was still alive.

She however knew she was right as she had "proof". She had found a man of the same name (a very common name) marrying at a time when uncle would have been mid twenties so likely to be marrying, and the marriage was in Dover where uncle died. When I pointed out that the name was very common and uncle didn't move to Dover till later in his life, she couldn't accept it because she had "proved" it. At that point I gave up.

I see she later added the correct lady as a second wife, even though she had the first "wife" still alive. Others have taken information from her tree without further checking so my poor uncle is on several trees as some sort of bigamist.

That's why many of us are wary about sharing.

Ancestry allows users multiple trees. This can be used in lots of ways. Versioning is one. Another is to split up a tree into sections with close family private and stuff from long ago left public. Despite the pain of name collectors I have found that this approach works fine and I have met some great people as a result. Plus some family mysteries solved and a few surprises!

When going back before 1837 there are not a lot of reliable public documentary sources which can be cross checked. However a lot of stuff does survive - wills , marriage contracts, fines, apprenticeships, commissions, degrees, holy orders, contracts, transportations - which can often only be found from a person with overlapping research. Of course due to the name collectors bona fides will be asked for. Anyone who just entirely clams up will miss such chances. F.H. as a worthwhile and interesting hobby depends on sharing.

The Gr tree is not suitable for serious use.

Even the best sourced trees can't know everything. I was exceptionally grateful for the lifetime's work on my dad's family and surname done by a gentleman who had gone to great lengths to source everything possible. What he and those who shared the same tree could not know is that my grandfather married bigamously under a different first name in an unlikely area. It was only my father's birth that could prove the marriage in retrospect so to speak.