I am relatively new to Roots Chat, and I confess I find threads such as this rather disturbing - mainly because it appears I am a pretty despicable person.
I am selfish (my tree is private) ill-mannered (I have copied material from other trees without asking the owner's permission) lazy (I have, occasionally copied what appears to be correct info for distant relatives of mine from trees belonging to near relatives of them) disrespectful (not everyone in my tree is dead yet, and I don't actually have written permission in triplicate from all of them to include them) and worst of all, I have almost 8000 people in my tree, so I am not a proper genealogist at all but merely a **** *********.
Before I go off and delete my tree I would, however, like to offer some defence.
First of all, I point everyone to the Terms of Service of Ancestry, particularly this bit
"Any User Provided Content that you have made public or shared (e.g. by including such User Provided Content in a public Ancestry family tree, as part of your public profile in one of the Services or in a public posting on one of our Services) may be used by other users as part of, or in conjunction with, the Services. We will not be required to remove any information or User Provided Content that you have made public or has otherwise been shared from the family trees or public profiles of other users."
Nothing on my tree is from a private tree, so actually, whether they know it or not, the people whose trees I have copied pictures, stories or anything else from have already given me permission to do so. Items posted to a public tree are SHARED with other users. It is not merely naive to believe others will not use that info, it is actually mistaken to believe they have to ask "permission" to do so. You gave them permission to use it when you shared it to a public tree.
As for my including living people being disrespectful, first of that is one of the reasons my tree is private, and secondly all the info I have comes from information already on the internet, so it isn't as if I am publishing private info about them (and even without the tree being private, as living people they don't show for anyone else anyway).
As for the number of people on my tree as long as I believe they belong there, that's all that matters. Distant relatives, in laws, or even relations of the in laws, if I consider them part of my family's story, then that is my decision.
The lazy one I'll accept.
I appreciate this may appear somewhat "defensive" to some, and if so I apologise, that was not my intent. What is my intent is to suggest maybe we should be more tolerant of what other people choose to do with their hobby, and stop criticising others for just doing things differently from how we do them ourselves.
