I Don’t Understand Why … - Sat, 7 May 2022

A few questions that plague me.

…Why Some Genealogists Keep Their Main Tree Private

Isn’t the purpose of genealogy to preserve and share the history and stories of your ancestors and their families? So what then is the purpose in a genealogist designating their main tree as private and preventing others from seeing it?

I’m not talking about privatizing living individuals, or family relationships that the family has not yet come to grips with. I’m not talking about private research trees that contain speculative information. I’m talking about a genealogist’s main tree where they’ve recorded the majority of their research.

Are they afraid someone will copy their precious life’s work?

… Why Some Genealogists Hate Others Copying Their Work

Yes, you’ll see profiles on other websites that are obviously taken from your own. But if you’re an experienced genealogist who has thoroughly researched and sourced your information, isn’t that what you want? You’re sure your information is as close to correct as possible. If that’s the truth and other people extend their trees into yours, wouldn’t you sooner them add your correct information to your tree than someone else’s incorrect information?

I would sooner get “hints” from MyHeritage or Ancestry that are from copied versions of my thought-to-be correct information than from copied versions of other people’s incorrect information.

You’re not going to stop people from copying information from other trees. So why not make your information available and let it become the standard that is copied, rather than someone else’s.

… Why Some Genealogists Protect Their Sources

Here, I’m talking about the case where someone says “I’ve spent thousands of dollars on research and thousands of hours of my time to do my research” and it seems that they don’t want to share that hard work with others.

Basically that is to force those people to do the research for themselves. All that’s doing is getting others to spend their time needlessly repeating what you’ve done when they could be furthering the work on that ancestor’s family instead. That further work might actually help the person who was not sharing!

There may be some circumstances where the source document itself needs to be protected. For example, I have a researcher who has paid to acquire records himself and charged me for the specific records that are relevant to me. I am not sure but currently don’t believe I have the right to share the source documents. However I still can refer to the birth record of so-and-so on yyyy-mm-dd in ppppppp as a source that I used. See the question I just asked at Genealogy StackExchange:  Do I have the right to share these records?

… Why Some Genealogists Hate One World Trees

Okay. The main answer to this one is easy. It’s because people come along and change your data. I won’t go into the details because you know what I’m talking about.

That is why it is good for us to have a master version of our family tree that only we can edit, either on our computer, and/or on an online family tree site that we allow read-only access to.

Adding our family trees to One World Trees are another way to preserve our genealogies. We can add people who are not there, attempt to correct information that is there with sources to explain our corrections. And we can find potential family that we did not know about, and follow up on them.

I’d be very happy and it would make sense if there were just a single unique One World Tree. But there are half a dozen of them, and they are all different with different information. Updating one when you get new data is not so bad, but updating 6 is a bit of a pain.

Yes, your data may get changed, but the potential benefits to you outweigh that one negative. Expect it. It will happen.

So I say don’t get hung up on it. Some aspects of One World Trees are self-correcting over time. If you’ve been sharing your well documented and sourced information for a while, it will eventually start to have its influence.