Of course I can appreciate that not everyone using Ancestry trees operates in the same way Lyn. We are all entitled to our thoughts and opinions. There are always going to be the aggregators sadly, and I think it reasonably obvious when I look at a tree with a huge number of 'people' that is what it is. I always look, too, at the sources straight away. And sadly there are always going to be RUDE people. -----Original Message----- From: Lyn Smith Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 11:24 AM To: Stephanie Cocks Cc: GenealogyFreak ; Bill Webster ; aus-sagen-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [AUS-SAGEN] Ancestry Public Trees There are many reasons not to make Ancestry trees public. Serious researchers know how much rubbish appears on public Ancestry trees. This is because people copy anything from other trees without any evidence that it is correct, and often obviously incorrect. e.g. parents 5 years older than their children .. I could go on and on. Before we knew better, my cousin and I had a public tree where we posted what we had researched on Ancestry, from many other sources and from a professional genealogist. A VERY unpleasant person copied the entire tree, of many thousands of people , none of whom were related to him or to anyone on his tree. He is an aggregator, interested only in the number of people on his tree, whether the connections or the “facts” are correct or not. When we asked how he was connected to our family, he sent a most impolite response. When we asked him to remove some information about living people, he sent a deliberately crude and insulting response. … and you think we should SHARE with people like him! Sharing is two-way. My cousin and I share whatever we find about our family, between ourselves. It has taken us years of serious effort and lots of money to find what we know. We are not willing to allow everyone in the known universe to take our research and misuse it online. We have made the tree private now, but, alas, the horse had already bolted. I have a number of private Ancestry trees which I use for families other than my own, to take advantage of the “hints” Ancestry provides. and for somewhere to store what I have found (from other sources as well as those found on Ancestry). Some people related to one of these trees sent me a very polite and reasonable message through Ancestry, enabling us both to benefit from sharing information in which we all have a legitimate interest. They now have access to my private tree, and I to theirs. They chose to make contact with me, because they could see from the limited information about me tree that I was serious about sources, and about the particular branch of the family they were connected to. I hope you can appreciate that not everyone using Ancestry trees operates in the same way! Lyn