Well said Helen and something perhaps that should have occurred to me to least present a counter to those wish to have only 'direct ancestor' trees. It will be interesting to see what repostes are made to this, and I am sure there will be some ...or may already have been given as I am a little late in coming across your post.
Have you actually contacted any of those 4th cousins without trees? I have, and quite often they have done a fair amount of research (or in some cases have inherited research), but just haven't put their trees online. Following the initial Ancestry message (which I agree with others can be clunky) we have compared notes and established the connection, then exchanged e-mails with details of our trees, documents, photos etc. so it has worked out fine.
Pauline, although the forum discussion partly inspired the newsletter article, it was also inspired by reading the Free UK Genealogy post (which I didn't at first realise was from 2 years ago). Writing about the ownership of trees was a natural follow-on from writing about the ownership of data.
I'm fairly sure that even if you attached a detailed tree to your DNA results the surnames of the people your cousins married wouldn't get picked up by Ancestry's name search (and please note, Bob, this would apply whether the tree is public or private).
Yes, that's what I'm thinking of doing. I have an extensive private tree currently linked to my DNA test (and same for my husband), but am thinking of making stripped down 'direct ancestor' trees, as suggested by Peter, to connect to the DNA whilst keeping the detailed trees private.
Good idea, thanks for this suggestion. I've tended to concentrate on surnames of blood relatives, but connections by marriage can be useful in this context.
Fair enough, though in one sense it doesn't matter whose thoughts you had in mind - I still feel the analogy is flawed, as ownership of information and copyright of something which uses that information are not the same thing.
I have used both public and private/searchable trees in both direct ancestor and "the lot" versions. However, I have concluded that a public "Direct ancestors and siblings" version might fit the bill as a compromise, showing the start of sub-branches. There are no directly visible "by marriage" people on the diagram, but they are referenced in a custom "Married" event in the sibling's profile which provides the spouse and any resulting name change.
They're not, and I didn't say they were, either in the newsletter or on the forum.
There's little advantage in adding more information unless it is going to show up in a surname search - and that doesn't happen for me (of course, I have to log-in as one of my cousins to test it out). Admittedly I don't have any custom "Married" events in my tree, but I don't see why that should make a difference since the spouses' names are shown.
I haven’t as yet but as your experience is quite positive I will give it a go.
That is not strictly true, if a living person has two deceased parents they can be seen and searches can be made to ascertain the living person's identity.
Yes I have come across occasional multiple family photos with names tagged to show who-is-who, and on rare occasions one might just be a living person. But even after years of using Ancestry it is such a rare thing as to be hardly worth mentioning. There are known methods to discover the names of living persons without relying on discovering by chance a name tag on a family photo. I make very (as in very) limited use of photos on Ancestry (99.9% of the remainder are all stored in my Tribal Pages available only by passcode to the family) and the ones I do entrust to Ancestry are just of the named (deceased) ancestor. Of course -as one who advocates Public Trees - (as I am sure you will have discovered) - I do not mind in the least anyone copying the photo if they so wish.
Let's hope you own the copyright! (This is unlikely to be a problem if the photo was taken before 1 July 1945 - for more details see the DACS website).
Agreed, and it wasn't my intention to suggest you had - or would.
That's a good point I had "missed" (ie not thought about) - it also requires some "juggling" of the data (though it is an add-on automatic process).
I think that likely a 'win-win' on both counts because as far as I can recall (perhaps not a cast iron certainty but close) all the photos come from within the family* with permission to use.