This has been an interesting discussion about "family secrets". I just recently traveled to California to meet descendents of my father's brother. It is one of the fun things about gathering information to hear "the other side of the story" from other family members. Then, I have to decide how to handle this "privileged information" in terms of passing it on. In my husband's family, there are two "secrets", one of an aunt who had an abortion in 1941 after her boyfriend was killed at Pearl Harbor. This is information that she never shared with anybody, but other aunts evidently passed it on to their children. For me, I would never put this kind of info into FTM or out there publicly. I just keep it in my notes. However, my father-in-law was married briefly just prior to marrying my mother-in-law, to legitimize a child of that union. I feel that this (probably) living person needs to be included in our family tree. I just enter it as a first marriage with no comments about it. In regards to uploading my FTM to public places, I would like for the program to have a way to completely block all notes, facts, etc. that I have in the FTM, but since it doesn't do this very well, I have started keeping a second copy of my tree and stripping out all notes before uploading it to Rootsweb. I also have learned the hard way that not all information needs to be added to FTM, but keep in a separate folder on my computer. It doesn't need to be "out there" for public knowledge. Lois Lois Brinks-Heath <[email protected]>