I certainly wouldn't laugh at that. When someone "borrows" or pirates your information do they just adopt it into their own tree? Can they disturb your tree or does it remain intact? I can see a lot of benefit to standing on someone else's shoulders but in my limited experience I've seen several occasions where someone just assumed my Gorman was their Gorman without checking other facts. Gale Gorman Houston On Apr 13, 2012, at 7:20 PM, Liz Engle wrote: Hi everyone: I have been working on my family tree for over thirty years now, and have had a marvelous experience along the way, exploring many primary and secondary sources of information about relatives on both sides of my family tree. I have benefitted from the help of close, distant and shirt-tail relatives, and, in the process of sharing information, many of these people have become friends as well as relatives. I joined Ancestry a few years ago and stand in awe of the tremendous job they have done and are still doing in providing access to a multitude of genealogical resources worldwide. I have, however, never submitted my own family tree on Ancestry -- not from a desire to be reclusive but rather because I no longer have the time or energy to maintain it on line. It is all I can do to keep my Family Tree Maker file uptodate, and to edit, improve, arrange and store the vast supply of our family photographs beginning about 1850 and collected over many years. A few years ago one of my cousins, with whom I share info, asked if I minded if he "went on" Ancestry with his Family Tree, which included all the data I had given him as well as a goodly selection of photographs of our grandparents, Gr. Grandparents, and even some Gr. Gr.s. I agreed, seeing no harm in it at the time. Well, can you imagine what has happened? Recently I had occasion to look at the data my cousin had posted on my own grandmother, who I knew very well during the first 30 years of my life. Gran had married her childhood sweetheart, my grandfather, and together they had two children - my mother and my aunt - and no others, and they had remained married to each other for 60 years dying in their 80s within five weeks of each other. However, an "Anonymous Person" had picked up my grandmother, added to her life by giving her a second husband and several more children, and adding my grandmother's ancestral history to that of "Anonymous Person's." If that were not enough, several more "Anonymous Persons" have jumped on the bandwagon and have added my grandmother's rather unique ancestry to that of their own, and in addition have absconded with all the family portraits that my cousin had posted, and claiming them for their own families. And this is only one occasion - I have since found several more instances of genealogical piracy of data that originated with me. Well, I know - I can hear you laughing - and it is sort of funny. In the long run, it doesn't hurt my own record of our family which I am preparing for my kids - but it does cast doubt on the veracity of any info that I or any of the rest of you find on Ancestry today. In my own Family Tree Maker files I meticulously record all sources I have found, and if no verification can be found I make a note of that, also, as being merely "family speculation," or some such. So BE WARNED !!! (and STOP LAUGHING, Okay?)