it is MY family tree!!!!!

[findem]

Hi,

I've had some unpleasant dealings with a few people on GR but the pleasant ones far outweigh the unpleasant.  Discovered quite a number of cousins of varying degrees of kinship including two second cousins I knew nothing of, one a year older than myself, was born and raised and still lives on the opposite side of my hometown, unbelievable.

Due to the unpleasant people I now have set myself some rules to observe before giving access to my tree or passing on additional info concerning the tree.

1) Need to be assured that the person is definitely related to someone in my tree.

2) They are researchers as opposed to collectors.

3) I only put the year of an event on my GR tree not the full date, there are one or two exceptions where I have added full dates such as where I need to repudiate false claims in another tree concerning my lines.

4) I do not show the earliest known ancestor of each line on my GR tree, only 100% genuine ancestor related researchers get that info.

I am very happy to share my findings with genuine people.

There is one young lady on GR who has constructed a tree on GR with info gleaned from GR, Ancestry.com and Family Search.  Consequently she has one of my Essex ancestors Joseph Willis, married with a family in Devon under the surname Wills, in Essex she has him married correctly with a family under the surname Willis, then married again to another lady in Essex with a family, again named Willis.  Stupidly she shows the children of the Devon marriage overlapping with the children of the first Essex marriage and then the children of the two Essex marriages overlapping.  This young lady is or was at the time a Uni  student, I just hope her Uni subjects were better researched.  Coincidentally I checked a couple of weeks ago and now some two years later the error remains, at the time she first made contact I did diplomatically point out the flaws in her tree.  All I can say is that if my ancestor Joseph Willis could have pulled off a feat like that he's a far better man than I. 

Regards.   

[Meezer]

Reading through the posts here I've been quite reassured to find that I'm not that unusual in having felt just a teeny bit possessive about my tree sometimes! The father of a distant cousin's wife has had a go at our family tree and published something totally inaccurate but sadly he's not interested in the correct version and that's really quite upset me.  In the past I've been happy to share with people only to have them lift the information, give me nothing in return and then vanish never to be heard from again. That's saddened me rather than angered me but as a result I'm not as quick to be so open. I'm very grateful to people who've passed snippets on to me, especially the bits that are personal stories that you wouldn't find on the net and am in contact with some lovely people as a result so you have to take the ups with the downs don't you?

[findem]

Hi Meezer,

I've experienced some of those lift the info and run types.

Another precaution I take when contacting GR hot matches is by including in my first message "if you give me access to your tree I'll be happy to do the same for you", it gives one the opportunity to see if there is a genuine connection etc.

So if ever you have a contact from someone with that phrase in the message you know it's likely to be me and if I get a reply containing words to the same effect I'll think it's you, then it will be a clash of wills as to who opens their tree first   

Regards.

[panda40]

I used to use GR when I first started out researching my tree. I put my whole tree online but just the bare information that anyone could find online from census or BMD records. When asked by others to view my tree i would share it. Only to find others would copy the whole tree including the branches that have no connection to them. I soon stopped using GR after a few demands from people saying I must let them view my tree. Now if someone makes contact either through GR or Ancestry I reply that I will gladly share information via email once the connection is proved. I also explain I will only share the information relevant to that particular branch and not my whole tree. This way I keep some control of the information that I have and the documents and photos I have.
One such mistake a name collector has made on Ancestry is having a husband and wife in their tree on two separate branches with no idea that these people are married. If they did their research fully they would know this one day the penny might drop and they will find out amongst the 25,000 names they have on their tree.
Regards panda

[copperbeech5]

I do sympathise with all the stories on here.

I naively offered some very personal family photos of my Gt Grand Father to someone who shared people in my tree.  I stupidly assumed that they would treasure them as I always have, but NO, suddenly I find MY photos plastered on their Ancestry tree for all the world to see. Daft as it sounds, I felt violated, and betrayed.

I think I would have felt hurt no matter what, BUT I think it might have been polite if the had asked me if I would have minded first.

Still, they have lost out long term, as I shall not be sharing anything else with that particular person.

Older and a lot wiser,
Copperbeech5

[johnxyz]

The original post asked how possessive we were of "our" family tree. It might initially seem a bit off topic, but some years ago a local family history group asked "how many relatives do we have" and I attempted to produce some answers.

The first problem is variability - I asked each member how many cousins they had. In a group of 30 the answers ranged from 0 to 52 with an average of about 10. So any answer can only talk in terms of broad averages.

My best estimate was that on average a person has about 40 second cousins (one pair of common great grandparents), 200 3rd cousins, 900 4th cousins, and it increases by a multiplier of about 4.5 for each additional step out.

Loking at it another way, each pair of ggp has on average about 10 descendants of my generation, each pair of 2ggp has about 25 such descendants and each pair of 3ggp about 60. For the next 3 it's 140, 340, and 810 at 6ggp.   

I have no real feel for what proportion of the population is investigating a family history, but supopose it is 1 in 100. Then for each pair of 6ggp I might expect there to be perhaps 8 direct descendants researching them. 

Based on this my view is that whilst as many posters have said there is some sense of ownership (and I share that sense of ownership) I must also recognise these ancestors are also "owned" by a large number of others, at least some of whom are actively researching. 

And what's the likelihood that each researcher has  got every step right? I have no idea, but I can understand why mistakes appear. 

[davethepost]

Hi,
     Interesting this numbers theme. I was at a funeral of one of my wife's aunts, and after being introduced to about the twentieth cousin, I had a quick count of my cousins and got to eight, My children have three, I then checked my tree when I got home and found that I also have eight 2nd cousins. My wife has 28 that she can name on just one side.

I have had nothing but good experiences with communicating with people who share any ancestors with me, but I seem to have developed a rule (without thinking about it) that I only communicate with people who have fairly small trees and this seems to work.

                Dave

[BevL]

Hi,
I am the same.  On Ancestry there are many families who claim the same forebears as me, but what I can't understand is that once in a while one of these people have completely different people than the majority who all agree as to births, deaths, marriages etc and you would think they would see this and try to see where they had gone wrong - though I suppose they think they are correct and we are wrong.  They have people living in another country but dying in WA where they have lived all their lives and other things as well.
I wrote to one who had my own grandfather down with another name tacked on to his and  I wrote and explained that there was a different spelling for his name and that the correct one was even his birth certificate and that also there was another person with the his name and a second name they had down for my grandfather - you know what they did, put both names down and left the extra name there as well so I gave up.
Bev

[Gone]

I can totally relate to this. I was looking through someone elses tree after I found people I didn't recognise. what I found really annoyed me, not only was there a picture of my grand dad on it which I know had been lifted of my tree, but he was with completely the wrong family. I tried to contact the person concerned but no response. what also annoys me is that other people might come across it and think its right
Griff