Genealogy Chat

Is it alright to have living reallies in my tree as reading a couple of threads on these boards is making me scared as i have a lot of live people in my tree, What do you think ? June

You have to have their permission first. I've put them on my tree but called them 'Living Williams', 'Living Evans' etc so they aren't too identifiable. nell

June, I used to have a few living rellies in my GR tree but have now taken them off because of fears of identity theft. I have to keep myself on it though. I now keep the majority of my family information, including living rellies in my family tree programme which is offline. You are supposed to ask living people's permission to put them on this site, but I suspect few abide by this ruling. Cheers, Horatia

I have too - and we shouldn't have, unless they have given permission, which none of mine have, because I haven't asked them!! My excuse is that I never give anyone access to my tree - only ever send reports or gedcoms to people with a connection, which I can doctor as necessary. This isn't really good enough though, as those names are still accessable when they shouldn't be. When I uploaded my tree I was not aware of my mistake and it's shear laziness that has stopped my fom making corrections. I think you can change their names to Living Smith or whatever. Merry

Hi Nell, I have got permission off all of them but do you think i should do as you have done and not put there full names in. I am getting scared now. regards June

June If having the names on your tree is scaring you, then delete them! nell

Hi Nell, Will do tomorrow as getting tired now thanks for advice regards June

I have hundreds of potentially-living names on my tree, most of whom I've never met, nor would I even know how to contact. I also update my GR tree from a Gedcom created from my FTM program, so it would be nigh on impossible to go through and manually delete all those possibly living names from here each time I reload my data. I get around this by ''privatising'' my Gedcom in FTM before I import it onto here. This leaves the names intact but removes all other identifying features such as date and place of birth. Therefore, no-one could claim that I have published details of living persons, as all that can be seen on here is say 'John Smith', who could after all be any John Smith. I rarely give access to my tree on here, I prefer to send details via email, as this gives me the chance to control the branches and the number of generations of my tree that I feel comfortable about giving out (and I always exclude the living generations from such data except to very close family members). Ideally I would like an option to completely remove all ''living'' names when I privatise the file, but my version of FTM doesn't give this option. Even better would be an option on GR whereby we could tick a box on/off to control whether or not living names are visible or appear in other people's searches. GR seem reluctant to do this though - probably because they would then have to revise significantly downwards their boast of ''search 50 million ancestors''. By the way, FTM assumes that a person is living if born less than 100 years ago and no death info is entered. Richard

Hi June There is no need to be scared!! If you are unable to privatise your tree before uploading gedcom as suggested by others on here just methodically plod through your tree and put 'living' in place of the Christian name. And/or delete the birth day ie put 1956 not 9/9/1956. By deleting some living rellies you may mess up your tree as there will be no connections in some cases if you delete them. It depends how complex your tree is. Kat

Hi Dont know what to do for the best as i have well over a hundred living on my tree and its going to take me a while to put Living on every one of them or delete them. Is there any other easy way around this ? regards June

The only information available if someone does a name search is first name, surname, birth year and place of birth - which unless the name is an unusual one would not be enough for anyone to trace them or steal their identity. The problem comes when or if you open your tree to others as then they can access dates of birth and marriage, names of spouses and children and any notes you have added. For this reason apart from me the only living people I have on my GR tree are a couple of aged aunts identified just as 'living' and a surname. If my parents, grandparents were still alive of course they would also need to be on the tree, but that would still not be many individuals to have to 'privatise' I use my Family Historian package on my PC to store details of all the living cousins, nieces nephews etc. After all its connections to people researching my ancestors I'm searching for, not to my known living relatives. This way I can still chose to send a Gedcom of part of my tree to any contacts who are closely related and I trust not to abuse the information.

June Do you keep your tree on your own computer at all using a Family Tree programme? If so, see if you can privatise all the living relatives, and then re-load the gedcom onto GR. If you do not use a programme at home, then I can recommend Legacy (if you google for it it will show the website). You can download this for free. I have used it for a couple of years and find it very easy and very effective. Once you have downloaded the Legacy programme onto your computer, export your tree from GR as a gedcom and open it up in Legacy. Then you can set it to mark all living people as 'private' (living people will be anyone less than 100 years old with no date of death), and then re-export the gedcom back onto GR. All you living relatives will then be shown only a 'Private' on GR, but you will still be able to see them properly on your tree at home. You can then add any new finds to your Legacy tree, and re-export it periodically to GR to update your on-line tree. Hope this makes sense. Tina

I have only my husband, myself and my children. This happened by chance as our parents are dead. However I found hot matches were matching my children to australian contempories so I will probably delete them.