Making your tree PRIVATE in Ancestry doesn't mean it is, really, as Ancestry takes all the details and puts them on One World Tree, without your permission, so people can find it there anyway. Also, when the town of birth is, say London, and no country, Ancestry adds any other London (like London, Canada) to fill in the gaps, quite often, so it may not be the person giving false information, it is the automatic templates Ancestry has when the whole address is not included. I don't see any harm in people copying a family tree FOR GUIDANCE but they should use other people's trees as a guide. Quite often several people copy a tree that is wrong, and they don't check the facts. I find others' trees useful, but don't trust any, they just show me where to look to check. One thing to guard against is giving someone rights to look at your 'private' tree on Ancestry - they go overboard and I have found my own details on someone else's public tree! Ethics, of course, is to stop at the grandparents when putting a tree on line. Have a look at www.tribalpages.com - there you can post your tree and it IS private. You have a password for yourself to edit the pages, and you can make another password for people you want to invite just to look at it - all under YOUR control. Gillian South Australia