New people appearing on my Ancestry.co.uk tree without my permission ?!

[kob3203]

My tree's public, but not shared with anybody, so only I should be able to edit it.

Today I noticed that the spouses of my grandmother's siblings, plus all her nephews and nieces, have been added to it. (I specifically did NOT include these people in my tree, as I am using it for direct ancestors and their siblings only).

Has anybody else had something similar happen ?

Does anybody know what might be going on ?

[Rosinish]

Not sure how it works when adding people but have you possibly added someone from the site (rather than inputting manually) which in turn has brought all their descendants in tow 

Annie

[rosie17]

Has some one else got access to your password and user name ...as I don't think you can add anything without it ....I might be wrong
Rosie

[*Sandra*]

If your tree is public - Other users can view all content in your tree except information about living people and notes. Other users can also see your username or full name depending on your account settings. No one should be able to access your tree unless you invite them and they have a password.

Sandra

[kob3203]

Rosinish: I made a mistake early today while adding a census record (for another family in a different branch), and that added a whole bunch of duplicate people who I had to manually delete. But I can't imagine any single record that would include all the spouses of my grandmother's siblings, plus all her nephews and nieces. And I'm fairly sure that I haven't added any records/people for this branch of the family recently.

rosie17: Nobody else has access to my username/password.

Sandra: That's what I thought, which is why I'm perplexed.

[ThrelfallYorky]

Oddly enough, today I clicked on one person I've not looked at for a while - and looked at their suggested "links" - and it threw up quite a few suggestions for another person, with a totally different name, on a different line in the same tree. Perhaps there's some sort of glitch today?

[kob3203]

Yes, I too thought that a few odd things were happening yesterday, even before I noticed these new people appearing (by the way, the new people are correct, more or less).

Regarding the particular conundrum of my mystery adder-of-people, I realized that although the tree wasn't shared with anybody there were three outstanding invitations to share my tree as a guest. So I cancelled them just in case. But I got an email late last night from a contact that seemed to indicate that one of those people, who turns out to be related to my contact and is actively researching the family in question at Ancestry, did actually receive my invitation. So perhaps the invitation was accepted and perhaps he added the new people?

Except that:

a) Ancestry didn't inform me, either via a 'Your invitation has been accepted' email or via the Tree Settings / Sharing option in my Ancestry account, that the invitation had been accepted.

b) he was invited as a guest, and guests can only view the tree, not modify it. I've just confirmed that for myself.

I'm currently awaiting a response from my contact to confirm whether or not the invitation was accepted, and whether or not the invitee actually made changes.

[*Sandra*]

You can choose roles to control what you will allow your friends and family to work on in your tree. Each person with whom you want to share your tree will have a drop down menu next to their name.
Choose “Editor” if you want to give your cousin full access to add and edit people in your tree.
Choose “Contributor” if you want your cousin to add photos but not change any facts in your tree.
Choose “Guest” if you don’t want your cousin to have any rights except to see your tree.

http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2011/05/17/share-your-tree-with-friends-and-family/

Sandra

[kob3203]

Thanks Sandra. I'm still waiting to see if it was my contact who made the changes.

If so then the most likely explanation is that I accidentally invited him as 'Editor', Ancestry's notification to me that he'd accepted somebody got lost, and he simply added the people who were obviously missing.

Even though I'm 99% certain that he was invited as a 'Guest' (along with two other people). I double-checked a few times to see whether anybody had accepted, but none had, and I'm almost certain that the invited roles were all 'guest', and that 'see living people was UNchecked. I was working on the basis that I can easily increase the role to contributor/editor, and/or tick that box at a later date.