Community Chat

[ALRATIBA]

---

@sommertime wrote:

---

@Roni18 wrote:

I have had a membership for many years now.  I have discovered so much there.  It has been well worth it for me.   One word of caution is that you must do your own research as many of the trees do contain errors.  

I would reccomend doing a trial membership to find out if you would like it.  

---

Yes, many people just seem to cut and paste others info without checking out and documenting their research before adding it to their tree.

---

@sommertime

One way to "protect" your own research on Ancestry is to set your tree settings to private.  People can still contact you, but you can determine whether or not to share your research.  All my trees are set to private.  

[sommertime]

@ALRATIBA Thanks for the info! I already found that out the hard way. I changed my setting to private several months ago, as I should have done this from the beginning. It is really exhausting at times sorting thru all the info to determine what is the correct facts. Some times I become so interested in reading thru everything I can't stop! lol

[Free2be]

As an Ancesstry member of many years, I strongly encourage anyone and everyone who creates a tree to make it public.  Sharing information makes for stronger (accuracy) and more complete trees for the genealogical community. 

I will never intrude upon a member directly asking them to share what they prefer to keep private. It's a matter of respecting their wishes even though it makes my heart sink a bit when there are photos and stories that could be shared.  Why bother if nobody else can see them without being asked and worse, have the request declined?   I've made contact with people who aren't relatives but I have nice studio portrait photos they would want, that my kids would destroy after I'm gone. They were thrilled to have them. 

[Moonchilde]

---

@Free2be wrote:

As an Ancesstry member of many years, I strongly encourage anyone and everyone who creates a tree to make it public.  Sharing information makes for stronger (accuracy) and more complete trees for the genealogical community. 

I will never intrude upon a member directly asking them to share what they prefer to keep private. It's a matter of respecting their wishes even though it makes my heart sink a bit when there are photos and stories that could be shared.  Why bother if nobody else can see them without being asked and worse, have the request declined?   I've made contact with people who arn't relatives but I have nice studio portrait photos they would want, that my kids would destroy after I'm gone. They were thrilled to have them. 

---

AFAIC, unless a person believes they Know It All about their genealogy and/or wants to do every single bit of research themselves (and assumes no one else can ever match up to their standards of investigation), there’s little or no point to keeping a tree private.

Most people who are starting out want all the help they can get, and appreciate it very much. In my own tree I used the census through the decades, and the census lists all household members. You can tell if a potential ancestor is not connected to or included in a census record with people whose names you recognize, or if they are. It was also extremely common 100+ years ago that given names will be spelled differently from census to census and even their ages be off a year or two; that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not the person you seek to verify.