Ancestor Collector

[valk]

Happy new Year everyone.
I am sure, we all have people who incorrectly include our ancestors in their trees, usually a mistake  by an inexperienced researcher when their ancestor has a similar name.
However, it has reached the stage that a large number of hints I get from  Ancestry originate from the same person, who is not remotely related to me.  I first became aware of him copying my father's family from my tree and those of paternal relatives but now he has moved on to my maternal relatives as well. His tree has been taken down now but included all of my great grandparents so I feel I am being cloned.
I do feel uncomfortable about this invasion of privacy and upset when I receive hints about my own father. I did ask Ancestry what could be done.  Nothing, of course.  Some people just have an aim to have the largest tree in the world and this guy found he was on a roll with my family.
Why do I get so many picture hints from him, you may ask?  He attaches a picture of a coat of arms to go with every surname.  This means that everyone he has pinched from my tree or a cousin's tree has had a picture attached which generates a hint. 
My solution was to make my tree private but that was too late and rather ruins my chances with co-operating with any dna matches that i might have.
Has anyone else had the same problem?

[Biggles50]

Yes, multiple times.

After then I made the trees private, it limited recurring hints but did not spoil any DNA Contact.

If the person is a DNA match you could try Hiding them and see if this cuts down spurious hints.

You can go into Account Settings > Trees > Hint Notifications & toggle Hints from Members Trees to Off.

Alas one cannot block hints from a specific tree.

You can also Block a Member, select them so you see the overview page and next to the Message tag there are three dots, click on them and the Block option appears, hopefully this will stop all hints from that members tree being sent to you, it may not but it is the best I can suggest.

[David Nicoll]

Hi, Happy New Year.
I understand we all feel ownership of our ancestors and there are privacy issues, that is why I generally don’t have people in my tree after about 1900, even if I know more.
It is a challenge though if you are trying to chase down a knotty relationship or distant DNA connection.
I do all my own research, I use hints as just that, almost all trees have errors somewhere, but I hope that by sharing my research I may help others find their own roots.
You say the person concerned is not remotely related. Have they got a bit of tree wrong, or might it just be a link you don’t understand? Is it possible there is an NPE you can’t see from your side of the wall?
Fundamentally it comes down to what we are willing to share, I have chosen to share 40 years of research by me and my parents in the hope that it will help others.
This includes photos of my great grandmothers cousins in the 1860’s, it was a big family, so unless you make your tree, wide you would not say they were related.
This approach means that I now know relatives all over the world, and have recently obtained a photograph of my great great grandmother in about 1900 from a relative in Australia, the only such photograph I have.

Happy Hunting

[aghadowey]

I had a particular experience similar to yours, valk.
A distant, very distant of my paternal grandmother's paternal grandmother concentrates his research on that particular surname and has a HUGE tree with descendants of our Canadian from Ireland. Lots of sources listed in his research, etc.
The problem? he added me to this huge tree and then proceeded to add my maternal grandfather, great-grandfather, etc. complete with pictures from my Facebook account (taken before it was private so many years ago). When I asked why they were added he said they were related through me. My mother's family and my father's family are not related to each other in any way, not even from the same country. I asked him to remove them (which he did) but I also ceased contact even though we would have been able to help each other with researching the family.

Just yesterday I was checking out a new DNA match and found their wikitree page listing our mutual ancestor. The source for the ancestor's details? ME. We'd never been in contact with each other and some of the details were not mine but forever after everyone will think all the information came from me 

[Jebber]

You only have to look at the many thousands of people in some trees to know the owner cannot possibly have researched them,  they are simply name collectors.

I only have one photo on my tree, it is of my material grandmother. It is on numerous trees and I took it from one of them. I own the original  and the tree I took it from belongs to someone I gave it to on condition it was NOT put on the internet.

[Andrew Tarr]

I have always avoided your problem by keeping my tree (and my wife's) private, on my own PC and nowhere else.  Every so often (well, about this time each year) I may visit Anc**try to see if I have missed anything worthwhile and believable - if I think it's good enough, I may 'borrow' it, and very rarely I may contact the owner.  But I never leave any footprints there !