I have a second cousin who has all of my great-grandmother’s pictures (including old photos of my grandpa’s siblings, namely his brother who died in childhood) and she flat out refuses to let me see make copies. I can almost understand why she doesn’t care if I get to see my great-uncles.. what I don’t understand is why she thinks my grandfather doesn’t deserve pictures of his own brother.

So, she is the reason why my tree, every picture I manage to find, and every document I get my hands on (whether I paid for it or not) will ALWAYS be public. And I truly hope she sees this comment.

Two of my three trees are public. I even share my living folks with those that are family and have trees with extensive work on Ancestry.com. And they have been gracious enough to do the same with me. It has been so helpful and has enabled me to make connections with the distant cousins I need to fill in the blanks.

I believe in sharing everything. I don’t care if I paid for it or not. If I paid for something like a death certificate, it was because I needed the info on it. I might as well share with others who probably hit the dead end I did. I would hope others would do the same. And I do try to give credit to others when posting pics and documents but I’m not always perfect about it. For instance, photo’s from the Find-a-Grave website are very useful to me. When I copy them, I note on the pic that it came from Find-a-Grave. I don’t take the time to document the person’s name that took it. Maybe I should but it’s too time consuming. Some would be mad at that but I feel as long as I’m crediting the basic source, I’m being respectful. I would encourage others to do the same but I would say to those who get so bent out of shape to relax a little.

And finally, my third tree that is marked private was done for one reason, that I’m so dissappointed about. I was adopted. And I have a tree on my biological family. When I enter my biological parents, and you look at “my” profile page, it looks to some like they these parents were married, which was not the case. You only get the real story by looking at either parent. Then you can see that they have seperate families. Ancestry.com should make some way to make this view different. Having said that, a family member didn’t like it, even though it is all completely factual and I had to mark it private.

We’ve all had our geneology grinches. I think the most important thing we can all do is share and give eachother a break. No one is perfect it what they do but as long as folks are trying their best, let’s not judge.

I too hate people who grab from my tree with no introduction, no hello no nothing. I think it’s important to keep trees public, minus the living people, but we should be able to control access to photos and docs.

Also, the “garbage” trees with incorrect information will always be on ancestry.
Those of us who provide proper documentation will stand out from the wannabees.

I would like to think that 100 years after I am gone, my cousins who see my tree on the internet would be grateful to know something about their most distant ancestors.

Does anyone here who has worked hard on their genealogy for years want their family tree information to go to the grave with them?