Privacy and public trees

[Jessie 888]

I've always been fiercely protective over my identity and privacy but I've had to modify that a bit with my DNA matches! I have four private trees on Ancestry (private to protect the living and the personal information about my ancestors that they might not have wanted others to know). The trouble was, when I came up on somebody else's list of matches, they wouldn't have bothered contacting me because there was no information for them to go on and I may have missed a vital link to one of my brick walls.

I've compromised by making a simplified public tree combining all my direct ancestors with just their birth and death dates and places. I wish I'd done that years ago and highly recommend it!

[Wilkes_ml]

Did you know that you can actually set a public tree to not show information about living people?
I'm pretty sure you can go into the tree privacy settings and make the changes, and all details including comments should be hidden.

I have many different trees on ancestry - usually one for each family name, or family group of names, but I realised that if I put images from certain sources that are not allowed to be shared, then I have to make my tree private. So I have also started making copies of my trees via exporting and re-importing ged-com files - The re-exported ones only contain source details with no attached images ( except those sourced from Ancestry) ....it's a pain and a slow process!

N.B. I didn't realise I lost all the images until I exported two trees from Ancestry that I wanted to combine in FTM12...it was only after I eventually managed to combine the trees in FTM12, then re-export it back to Ancestry as one larger tree that I realised all the attached images eg. scanned certificates & PRs had gone...

[Jessie 888]

Ha ha! I did just the same! Now I just keep everything on my Family Historian software and upload a GEDCOM to Ancestry every four months or so.

I did set my settings to hide living people but I think I must have 'trust issues' with big companies and private information. Obviously need therapy!

[Megan Roberts]

Ancestry automatically hides details of living people.

[harleyallison]

I am new to DNA testing and have just had my DNA test results back and looking for help come across your thread. I am one of them people who would not have contacted you due to there being no information to go on but will no longer due that. I will contact everyone of interest just incase I miss a vital link.
I thank you very much for posting this thread