Genealogy Chat

I foolishly emailed my GEDCOM to a "cousin" and now it has been published in its entirety on this site. I am so very, very angry, because it contains personal info including living relatives. Any advice? If nothing else people should take this as a healthy tip on not what to do.

Hi How awful for you - a salutary tale. There is a message on the Add Relations page for this site that says Please Note: You must have the permission of any living person to include their details here. If you are asked to do so, you must remove those details. You are the controller of the information you input relating to living persons. I think you could ask your 'cousin' to remove the living relatives immediately, if not your entire GEDCOM, if you are unhappy with it. If you have any difficulty then you should contact the abuse manager and see what they suggest. Best wishes Ann

Paul You could ask GC to remove it.

Thanks guys. I've done both. I'll let you know the outcome. I can only imagine that it was a gross lack of judgement rather than anything malicious, but on the face of it it does seem incredibly disrespectful and inconsiderate.

I am sorry Paul to hear that your family history has been taken advantage of in this way. I can only say that I too have had this problem with both this site and ancestry(.)com. It is a sad fact of life I have now discovered that you cannot trust everybody and my response has been to be so much more wary now with whom I share my info. I hope you can take out your living relatives without too much hassle. For what its worth I wrote to the person concerned in Ancestry(.)com and lodged a strong complaint and the person did take the info off the site as I said that the info I had given was not totally accurate and unproven and it was sending the wrong messages to would be family historians for this unproven material to be published in this way. The message must be that if you receive info from others that you do NOT hijack this material as your own. You either ask permission to publish or you do NOT publish. I was very cross with the Genes Connect mistake that I made as I sent info to a possible cousin dating back to late 1700's all verified, to not only find it all on the site without any permission from me, but having got absolutely nothing in return! Well, Iam back to the 1600's on this line and he is not getting any more from me and that was never my intention either. However, there are useful cousins out there and I have found two who have respected all info I have given them and I have respected all info they have given me. Janet

Janet I hear you. I've been free sharing info, thinking anyone with common aims would understand the boundaries of sharing information. Early on I received alot of help from strangers, and now I'm in a position to reciprocate, but this is something I never foresaw. The irony is 90% of the info he has published is totally irrelevant to his bloodline, so I have no idea what he is up to. Maybe it was a brain fart, but so far I've heard no response from him or Genes Connected. Grrrrr.

Paul Exactly the same thing happened to me. A few years ago I sent an gedcom to a distant cousin of my husband in Australia. A few months ago this info appeared on GC. Including living people. I learnt my lesson, I never give any living people info to others now. She also included the data from the rest of my husbands family there has no bearing at all on hers, just a marriage link in 1867. After that date none of it is any relation to her at all. When I contacted her and asked her to remove the living people, which included my mother - how can that be a relative!!!, she did do so eventually but said I was pompous. Everytime I do a search on here for these names, hers are there. I know she doesnt have anymore info because she got it from me in the first place. I wonder what she tells others if she gets a contact email? Margaret

Paul, Im sorry that you have had theses problems but at the same time I am pleased to see the response as I was begining to think that I was doing something wrong by not giving out my hard work to a couple of rellies who thought they'd like to take a short cut and use all my findings (not to mention all the hours of detective work and the costs). I stood my ground and politely told them that I would reveal 'all' when I had finished. After all there is nothing to stop them tracing and they may even find things that we have not. Sheila

I thought the idea of this and other sites that have common surname pages was the if one had links to another persons tree was to help each other.

yes John to help but not to take over and claim as your own.

I don't know what other people think but I'm happy to share any helpful info with potential 'cousins' but not my total GEDCOM since it contains stuff about living relatives and some of them and their offspring have not come to terms with skeletons that have leapt out of cupboards. I think we have to respect that not all our living relatives wish these secrets to be let loose. Over the years I've discovered that, amongst other things, one great great grandfather was keeping two wives, one family member had two children by her husband's brother, and another couple did not marry until all the children were well grown up. The offspring of these people with skeletons would not all be happy with these facts being made public - some of them have families of their own who don't know and they don't want them to know. My late mother lived in fear of a family skeleton being revealed, it haunted her most of her (short) life. And I don't think it was that awful a thing anyway ... but it was to her. If the facts were made public then, as the family genealogist, it would be apparent that I was the source. I don't want to spoil the lives of those who live in innocence. Best wishes Ann

Yes Ann, I totally agree. I have found things in my family that are best left swept under the carpet (for the sake of those who still remember.) The family members who were pushing me so hard for information on everything that Id found were only interested in the Geneaolgy side of things and not the family side, as both were in laws and not blood relatives at all. I have no desire to hurt the feelings of my elderly relatives whos values on lifes events are so different to our modern day ones.

I have some sympathy with all sides here. I've sent my GEDCOM to many of my close relatives and I'd hope they would instinctively know not to publish info on the living without checking I certainly asked all of them if they even minded their names appearing on the internet, but when I export my GEDCOM to a website, I always remove everything except the name from the details of the living anyway. I've made another much more distant link through GC and have not exchanged GEDCOMs (not that I'd mind if they wanted it), but have given them access to my tree and they've given me access to theirs. I've added the direct bloodline into my own tree & this now appears in the latest GEDCOM I've put on GC. (Sorry for spelling your hubby's middle name wrong Kathy!) I didn't feel as if I was stealing their work, just being complete in my records & I've sent them a load of information in return which I hope they found useful. I agree with John that this is surely how this site is supposed to work. Paul - sorry you feel let down, but if you get to talk to your cousin, I'm sure you'll find their motives are OK. I do wonder if everyone I've sent my GEDCOM to would realise it was best to exclude the living if they upload it to a website. Rick.

Ann I totally agree with you. When I first started my family tree I assumed that my siblings would be as interested as me in the family history but I upset one of them unintentionally because of a few family skeletons. She thought that I was just interested in the skeletons. Well, they are often the most interesting people, but yes we do have to be responsible when we act as family historians so I am selective as to what I give people. Also I have always been happy to be in touch with "lost"cousins and give them info but it should be reciprocal and I do not expect them to take over the information as their own that I have given them freely after much hard work and expense on my part. In the end it is all a question of trust and honesty and if you cannot trust people to honour the info you have given to them then it sours the relationship of a new found cousin before it has even begun. Janet

Hi I know this subject comes up every so often, but I am also one who is happy to share all my information, and don't mind at all if whoever comes along uses it. Hopefully the more people who have my tree and the more it is "published" the more family I gain, and just one person who see's it may come up with that missing piece to go back further. But I guess we all do thing differently and that's what makes us interesting! Lynda

Hi I too have submitted GedCom files and now find that in some cases my files have been hi-jacked by the people concerned. and appear as their own work I have even appeared on some of them although I never include living people in anything I export This includes some on Genes Connected I contacted the people concerned and told them to remove the details and I also informed Genes connected On other sites I have found Info that I submitted when enquiring if there is a family connection appearing in their family trees even though there isn't one. Bren

Hi, this ia all fairly new to me. I have only recently exported my file to Gencircles (wasn't easy - computer technology!). I didn't really think about the use it could be put to and there were skeletons. Thinking about it though, all those concerned are now dead and I really don't mind the info being out there -it gives an insight into the way our ancestors lived. I'm happy to share what I find and assumed if others put their research out there they too wanted to share. I have taken on board to check with compilier and that acknowledgement to others research should be made, so thanks for the warning. Maggie

Just a quick comment to say that the laws in many countries differ from those in the UK regarding publication of this kind of information on public sites. It is NOT illegal to publish the names, birthdates and birthplaces of living individuals in the US, and that may be true in other parts of the world. Here in the US we have something called FOIA, the Freedom Of Information Act, which addresses general data on people. We also have another Act, known as the RFPA, Right To Financial Privacy Actwhich makes it unlawful to disseminate certain types of FINANCIAL information ONLY. At least that's what I understand is the "way it works" here. While the cousins behavior may be in"poor taste", and certainly people should be asked before publishing any kind of information if only as a courtesy, anything related to LAW can develop into a knotty problem, especially "Internationally Speaking". My husband is an artist, and frequently uses photographs of family members as inspiration for artworks and figurines. We were advised by a lawyer to get prior permission of the family members, because we used the pictures on our "business" web-site, to show what type of custom work could be done from wedding photographs. He also publishes his work on other websites, and makes certain that it is "copyright" protected, to help avoid having someone steal his creation. Perhaps someone with a legal background would be able to help. Any takers, out there among the many readers of posts at this site?

Gina That's useful, thanks very much. The guy still hasn't responded, which is unusual considering he was chomping at the bit to get the information from me. GenesConnected haven't responded either, but maybe that's because it's Easter. Fingers crossed. I think some are missing the point here. I am very willing to share information, but there are reasons beyond just protocol why the living should not be published without permission. The main reason is it is a security risk... mother's maiden names etc are commonly used to verify a person's identity. Also, living people may not want to be traced through the internet. And then, of course, are the skeletons that strangers have no right to publish without permission. The most perplexing though, is why does he need credit for (say) my wife's family tree. What can anyone learn by contacting him instead of me??? Hopefully Genes Connected will abide by their rules and delete the culprit's tree.

Maybe I'm missing something here? I thought that on GC you can't see the details of anyone's tree unless they explicitly give you permission to do so? All that comes up from a name search is name, place and year of birth. There doesn't seem to be any other details available, such as relationships, etc - certainly nothing that identifies an individual, or reveals any family "skeletons". In fact, there is really insufficient info available in most cases to be able to identify any useful link - e.g. "John Smith, London c1890" could be on just about anyone's tree! The GenCircles site automatically strips identifiable info from anyone who might be living - even the first name. Again, I fail to see how this info could be used for identity fraud or the like. Maybe GenesConnected could build a similar feature into this site? This "identity fraud" issue is really a lot of tosh. If a potential fraudster was smart enough to look on GC to get someone's mother's maiden name, then I'm sure that they would be just as capable of looking it up on 1837online (where mother's maiden name appears alongside everyone's birth entry!) Nevertheless, I agree wholeheartedly that the source of all info should be acknowledged - this is good scientific practice as well as common courtesy to the originator of the work. The problem is that any such acknowledgments, if they are included, are stored in the Gedcom file but do not appear in the GC tree diagrams. Therefore, maybe your hard work has been acknowledged in the person's Gedcom file, you just can't see it on this site?