Family Historian User Group

Hi

I have done this to create a private tree on Ancestry, the aim of which is for my cousin and someone I know to be able to see. Although I have the "private" flag set in FH6.2, all the details have come up in the Ancestry tree so, unless I change it so that it is completely private (ie doesn't come up as a private tree in searches) people can see it.

I used "Default" as the destination and "UTF 8" as the format - should I use one of the other options, or is there something else that I may have done wrong?

thanks

Paul

There are a number of issues to consider.

You say you have the "Private" Flag set in FH V6.2, but the Private Flag is only attached to selected Individual Records, so are you expecting those Individual's details to be excluded somehow?

Anyway, the best solution is to make your Ancestry tree Private, and Invite selected people to Share it.
When logged into Ancestry, click TREES near top left, and choose Create & Manage Trees.
Against your named tree choose Manage tree and then the PRIVACY SETTINGS tab.
Select Private Tree and tick Also prevent your tree from being found in the search index and SAVE CHANGES.
Now select the SHARING tab at the top and click INVITE PEOPLE.
You can just EMAIL them or if they have an Ancestry account use their USERNAME.
You decide whether they have a read only Guest role, or a Contributor or Editor role.

Finally, I suggest you use the Export Gedcom File Plugin in (ANC) Ancestry Family Tree mode to create the Gedcom file to upload.

tatewise wrote:There are a number of issues to consider.

You say you have the "Private" Flag set in FH V6.2, but the Private Flag is only attached to selected Individual Records, so are you expecting those Individual's details to be excluded somehow?

Yes, I thought it would. I can't think of another obvious reason to set a private flag. When exporting, I was asked to select records and did so.

Anyway, the best solution is to make your Ancestry tree Private, and Invite selected people to Share it.

I did say I had created a private tree

Finally, I suggest you use the Export Gedcom File Plugin in (ANC) Ancestry Family Tree mode to create the Gedcom file to upload.

OK I will try that and see what happens.
Thanks

Paul

The Private Flag (and Living Flag) has several purposes.
It can be used in Reports, Books, and Websites to restrict details.
When exporting GEDCOM file, Select all the Individuals and use Remove using Query with Has Flag for Private, but you may end up with several isolated sub-trees in GEDCOM file, because the removed Private Individuals may break the family relationships.

I assumed that with a Private Tree you were unsure how to make it visible to other people, without making it a Public Tree.
If you knew how to do that, I could not figure out why you were concerned about hiding Private Individuals.

The benefit of the Export Gedcom File Plugin is that it produces an Ancestry dialect GEDCOM file as explained in the Help & Advice under Output Formats in which most of your FH data is still visible in the Ancestry Tree but sometimes in a different form.

BTW: Did you find the how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers useful that I mentioned previously in Duplicate names (shown as aka...on tree) (13451)?

In the past I found Ancestry to be very unconcerned re loopholes in their who is not shown as 'living', so I found the only sure way to keep the living private and display the rest to the public was to exclude them from my Gedcom export.

Jim, can you confirm that if you exclude such Individuals from the GEDCOM, then you may end up with multiple unrelated sub-trees, where those excluded Individuals break the family links.

Mike, I have no proof one way or the other but I would suspect you are bound to get "multiple unrelated sub-trees, where those excluded Individuals break the family links.".

It all depends what your 'public' intentions are as it would only affect the most recent generations. The other option would be to use the Plugin Clean Living People to display them as living, but you could argue that even that gives some information away. There is also the issue of recently deceased people you might still want to be private, but to overcome that, I suppose they could be made private somehow.

Basically I would not trust Ancestry's (and probably others too) privacy 'algorithms' for those without a birth or death date. The way around that for me is to ensure everyone in my database has a birth date, one can at least estimate one, and that also makes tracking/connecting/etc them easier.

But, if you want to 'privately and/or publicly share' living data on sites like Ancestry, ensure you have some sort of birthdate (a real date not say a datephrase), so that the site algorithms have a better chance of working out who is still living and hence exclude them.