Which Part of Your Ancestry Needs to Be Private?

The genealogy world is up in arms due to an extreme overreach by Ancestry.com. No one ever pays attention to a website's policy updates. And they were counting on us to ignore this latest change.

But the Legal Genealogist Judy Russell sounded the alarm for us all. Ancestry says they're claiming full rights to the photos in our online family trees. Your favorite family photo of Grandma might wind up in Ancestry's advertisements. And you would have no legal right to stop them.

What were they thinking? They thought they'd get away with it, that's for sure. Can you imagine the corporate meeting where they decided to own our photos?

Before the September 2, 2021 deadline, people are removing photos from their Ancestry trees. From now on, the discoveries we make in other people's family trees will be a lot more bland. No more finding photos of the 3rd great aunt you just discovered.

I do all my family tree work on my desktop in Family Tree Maker. I didn't have to "delete" my photos. I went through them in the FTM Media Library and clicked a checkbox to make them all private. Then I synchronized my tree with Ancestry.com, which removed 444 photos from the website—not from my tree.

This works fine for me. The vast majority of my people have no photos anyway. They have vital records from the 1800s. I don't own those records, so I'm happy to share them along with their URLs.

Today I remembered the large family tree I created for my sister-in-law. I don't update it anymore. I went to the tree on Ancestry and went to the Media Library. I removed every photo (not cemetery photos or documents). These photos were mostly given to me by a distant cousin of my sister-in-law, so they are not mine. I have a duty to protect their property as well as mine.

Removing or making images private in the Media Library is faster than viewing profiles one at a time. That goes for your family tree on Ancestry or your desktop tree.

Take the time right now to safeguard your family tree photos from other uses.

Does It Matter to You?

What do you think needs to be private? I'm always surprised by people who won't take a DNA test because of a perceived threat to their identity. It isn't your bank account PIN. How would someone profit off knowing you're 55% Irish? And if I have a serial-killer cousin, I want them to get caught.

I've never had a problem with my family tree being "out there," and I still don't. But I did take back my photos.

After doing that, I realized I did have my family tree in one place I'm very unhappy about. Geni.com is a free-for-all, "one world tree" type of site. People can merge your family members with theirs. They can edit your people. When I uploaded my large GEDCOM file in 2008, I thought it was MY family tree.

I wanted to delete my tree long ago, but strangers have put their hooks into it. They have made themselves managers of my closest family members—with no rhyme or reason.

I decided to delete as many people as I could from my geni.com family tree. I had to do it one at a time, which took lots of clicks and was murder on my right arm. It took me hours. You cannot delete someone if they will break your tree. For instance, someone has added to the family of my other sister-in-law's ex-husband. I can't delete his family without breaking the tree someone else built onto him. So I can't delete my sister-in-law, and I can't delete my husband. I have this type of situation in a few places.

Since I can't delete some of my closest relatives, I made sure their profiles are private. I deleted two men who made themselves "managers" of MY people. I found that one of these mystery men had a relationship to a branch of my ex-husband's tree on his English/Irish side. But why glom onto my whole family (all Italian) and my current husband's family (all Japanese)? That's insane and as much of an overreach as Ancestry.com is making.

I'm glad my photos are private. And I'm very glad I reined in my geni.com tree. But I need my Ancestry family tree to be public. It's of great value to anyone with ancestors from a handful of Southern Italian towns.

If you have a family tree on Ancestry.com, you've got a decision to make. Don't wait until the September 2 deadline. It's time to take action.

What Do You Think You Are?

When Suni Lee won her gold medal in gymnastics at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the press touted her as the first Asian American to do so. As the wife of an Asian American, I was curious to see which type of Asian she is.

Reading that Lee is Hmong was confusing. I'd heard of it before, but I wondered where the Hmong people come from. I read that Hmong is an ethnic group found in parts of China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. That's a very large geographic region.

The difference between ethnicity and nationality should be important to genealogists. As shown by the Hmong people, an ethnic group can extend beyond national borders. Likewise, you can have more than one ethnic group within a nation.

Ethnicity is important when reviewing your DNA results. I'm mostly Southern Italian, which is a different ethnicity than Northern Italian. All my traceable roots come from a very small part of Southern Italy. That's why my "community", according to Ancestry DNA, is Campania and Molise—two neighboring regions in Italy.

I looked at the DNA results of my friend (who turned out to be my 6th cousin). Her core ethnicities are Central Ireland and Southern Italian. Her Central Ireland communities are specific to quite a small geographic footprint. Her Southern Italian community is the same as mine.

Remember that your DNA is oblivious to national boundaries.

How do you self-identify? Getting into genealogy has made me identify as Italian more than ever. Yes, I'm American, but my cultural and genetic heritage is Italian. We're an Italian family that happens to live in America and speak English.

Growing up in suburban New York, my classmates were Italian, Irish, Polish, German. I didn't call them American because that was a given. We were all Americans, but Americans are always something else, too. We even called it a nationality (e.g., "What nationality are you?" "I'm Irish.").

Focus on your ethnicity, not your family's country of origin, and your DNA pie chart may make more sense. My pie chart also contains some Greece and Albania, and a bit of Northern Italy. It's clear to me that Greeks, Albanians, and Italians have a shared ethnic origin. People from these areas are very similar. I can imagine we can trace our ancient roots to the same place.

My cousin's adopted daughter has 13% "Germanic Europe" in her DNA profile. Ancestry DNA says this is mostly in Germany and Switzerland, but it reaches into several countries. If you have this ethnicity, but none of your ancestors came from Germany, it would be easy to think this was an error.

She also has 11% Middle East. My first DNA results showed 44% Middle Eastern, which was confusing. But my cousin's daughter's Middle East DNA comes from a specific part of Lebanon. Having Lebanese ethnicity is quite different than the much broader "Middle East". And it's easier to understand.

The best example I've seen of an ethnic group that spans nations is "European Jewish". This ethnicity reaches back to huge amounts of people who had to move from place to place. It's a perfect example of how ethnicity is not tied to nationality.

Ancestry DNA says, "We estimate your ethnicity by comparing your DNA to DNA samples from groups of people whose families have lived for a long time in one place." I can prove my ancestors stayed in their little corner of Italy for centuries. So did their neighbors. This makes us a strong, condensed ethnic group.

So, what do you think you are? I always thought I was Italian and DNA bears me out. Do you belong to an ethnic group that comes from many countries? Did large groups of your distant ancestors migrate from one region to another?

If you have ethnicities that span countries, you may need to adjust your thinking. There's nationality (especially during the Olympics). And then there's ethnicity. Perhaps your roots are deeper ethnically than nationally.

And speaking of DNA results:

• Making Sense of Your DNA Results
• This DNA Reference Site Solved a Mystery
• How to Use the Power of Shared DNA Matches

Which Genealogy Documents Are You Missing?

Working on your family tree gets more exciting each time you discover something new. Maybe you discovered your great grandfather's brother and followed his paper trail. Maybe you went off on interesting tangents and built out several branches. Once your new discoveries run their course, you may find your family tree is a lot bigger.

How do you get back on track? How can you make sure you collect every available document for everyone in your family tree?

For me, the answer is simple. My document tracker is a 4,870-line spreadsheet that shows each document I've added to my family tree. It lists people from my tree in alphabetical order—but only people for whom I have documents. (Download a document tracker file you can use for yourself.)

This inventory of which genealogy documents you have and which you need will help you make your family tree more complete. (Never finished, but more complete.)

Most of my documents are very old Italian vital records. I do something special for those lines in the document tracker.

• If I've added all available documents for a person to my tree (birth, marriage(s), and death), I color their line green. That tells me that person is complete.
• In a completed person's "Need to find" column, I enter n/a for not applicable.
• If I can't get one or more of a person's vital records because they aren't online, I color their line blue.
• In an incomplete person's "Need to find" column, I enter what is missing, like this:
  • out of range: birth
  • out of range: marriage
  • out of range: death

Here's a 40-second video (no sound) showing the process above.

Lately I've been working to make my collection of Italian vital records searchable. Since they are searchable, I should be able to complete all my Italians' "Need to find" columns.

This is such a fulfilling task! The documents are waiting for me to get them and add them to my family tree. So why wouldn't I chase them down?

I started at the top of my document tracker, but for now, I'm focusing only on those Italian documents. I'll skip over all the people with U.S. or other documents.

One at a time, I search my computer (using a free PC program called Everything) for a person. The document tracker tells me which documents I'm missing. Now I can definitively say if a person was born, married, or died "out of range" of the online documents. And if I find a missing document, I crop it in Photoshop and add it to both my family tree and my document tracker. I also create a source citation for each fact I learn from each document.

So many lines are now colored either green for complete or blue for out of range. Some day, if I gain access to church records, I may find many of the out of range documents. My document tracker will make it easy to see which church records I want.

This level of completeness makes me really happy. I always have a bunch of genealogy projects going on at the same time. One involves identifying all my relatives from one town, Santa Paolina, Avellino, Italy. For that fast-paced project, I'm adding facts only, not documents or citations. Not yet.

Diego was born out of range of available genealogy documents, but I know I found all that's available.

Right now I want to work through my document tracker, filling in the blanks. Then I'll start adding documents and sources for my Santa Paolina people.

In my first two days of finding missing documents, I added 75 document images to my family tree. Unfortunately, there is a problem with Ancestry.com right now. No one can synchronize their Family Tree Maker file with Ancestry. I don't want to add tons of facts and documents until I get synchronized again. But I can collect and crop the images I need, and save them to add to my tree later.

If your family tree isn't too big, you can go person-by-person and see what you're missing. You may even want to create and fill in your document tracker at the same time.

My family tree has more than 30,500 people right now. I'm so glad I created my document tracker when I had less than 1,000 people. If your tree is too big to consider doing a person-by-person check, keep things close to you. Examine only your direct ancestors to see what's missing. Then branch out to the siblings of your direct ancestors.

Also, each time you view a person in your tree, for whatever reason, take note of what they're missing. As long as you're working on them, you may as well go all the way and search for everything you need.

Yes, those genealogy tangents are fun! But don't forget to double back and fill in the blanks for a more complete family tree.