Hi All, An interesting discussion. I too have reservations about the on line trees. I have the basic membership to genes reunited but my on line tree is a small little shrub compared to what others have. I have listed my direct lines with just year for date, not siblings & all other branches of my research that I have on my computer database. It does mean I am not often contacted by others but I do my own searches & if I find a match I am able to send off an email to the person with that name listed. If I do forget to untick that darn little box that invites them to see my tree without even bothering to contact me it is not too much of a loss. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind sharing BUT I will share what connects with them only. Why should they want what is not connected to them anyway. I am happy to share but not to just give. On line trees do not encourage sharing, they encourage people to take without taking the time to establish a correspondence & mutual sharing of knowledge, proof of research, sharing of the source of information, exchange of family stories & all that I think genealogy is all about. If they are just name gatherers & don't want to waste their time sharing information that is fine with me because I am not interested in how many names they may have on their tree without documentation even if it impressively does go back to Adam. With the hundreds of thousands of names some of these people have listed they could not possibly have lived long enough to have verified all this data. When contacted many know absolutely nothing about the person whose name they have listed. I have also had a few successful contacts I may not have otherwise made. I think a lot of the people are new to research & they haven't quite got it yet. They will gather all these names as they trawl the net & most likely will lose interest & move on to something else having "done" their tree. Unfortunately doing it this way they probably never will "get it". I really don't know what the answer is to the problems being caused by these groups encouraging people to do their trees on line. It is a shame that it is making many of us less willing to share. All of us long time researchers have had some bad experiences, I had to ask one person take down the names of living relatives of mine that she had added to the rootsweb world connect site. I am glad I was the one to stumble across the names rather than an uncle or cousin. She did take them down, it wasn't that she meant to do it but just added information I had given her some years before to her tree & then later decided to upload "her" data. Just as the IGI became tainted when patrons submissions were added to the genuine records of church baptism & marriage so is a lot of other data that we have shared with others in good faith. It is frustrating to see wrong information out there but as long as we know our own data is well researched & verified we are just going to have to shrug it off. There is a good & bad side to everything. There is a wealth of new information at our fingertips today on the internet that took many hours of hard work to find a few years ago but I am also noticing that many free sites to indexes compiled by volunteers are disappearing while the data is becoming available on the big pay to use sites. These companies who are busy harvesting data to present on their pay sites are also the same ones encouraging people to upload their trees. Sharon