Think before you post

 

It was a while ago, a matter of decades rather than years, when I first subscribed to Ancestry and was able to build my own family tree on there. That tree grew slowly. It's still very much a work in progress. Initially I'd hope that having a tree and information visible would be similar to those far away days of collaboration on genealogy message boards. But contact and collaboration on the Ancestry website were minimal at best. The rate of communication hasn't changed much since DNA testing and matching came along.

Something that I heard someone say in one of my genealogy groups along the way provided a possible clue as to why I wasn't getting any feedback on my tree. I'm not sure of her exact words but the gist of it remains. She indicated that she didn't look at family trees on the website unless there were a lot of photos and records attached to the tree because the lack of attachments meant the research of the tree's owner was suspect.

That may be one way of thinking of family trees that are bare of pictures and records but I have another. I didn't want to post the pictures and documents I'd found over the years because I didn't want them to be grabbed and copied ad infinitum. Besides some of the information in my family history files had been obtained under fair use (actually fair dealing in Canada), which I interpret to mean that the pictures or records I kept would be okay for personal use but not for publication. How then could they be placed on my family tree on a family history site to be fair game for any user to copy and publish on their own tree? As it was, I'd been unpleasantly surprised to see some of the information I'd sent to others back in the day now showing up attached to online family trees. Those items had been sent in the far off heady days of collaborating on the same family lines by snail mail and Rootsweb. When sending those items, I'd imagined them filling the recipients own family binders, never dreaming of how the online sites would expand and the possibilities they'd present.

So, if you see a bare family tree on a genealogy website like Ancestry, it doesn't necessarily mean that the owner's research is lacking. It might just mean that they are aware of the limitation mandated by copyright law.