1 Thing You Should Fix Now On Your Ancestry Family Tree
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When living individuals are listed on your public Ancestry family tree, their information should, of course, be privatized.
But there aren’t many reasons why a deceased ancestor who has been dead for at least a century should need to be made private.
It doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help other researchers who are viewing your tree.
If your Ancestry family tree has private ancestors showing up where they don’t belong, you should stop and fix it now.
How an Ancestor Becomes Private
If you uploaded a GEDCOM to create your Ancestry family tree, and you did not include death dates for some of your ancestors, they could be showing up as private… even if they’re long dead.
According to this archived Ancestry.com blog post, here’s what is happening (emphasis added by me):
So how does Ancestry determine who’s living and who’s not in your family tree? This happens a couple of ways: First, when you add or edit a person on Ancestry.com you set whether the person is deceased or living—and we respect that setting. Secondly, if you add someone through a GEDCOM upload or link a tree from your Family Tree Maker software (where there’s not a living/deceased setting), then we calculate the living status based on the following rules:
1. First we look for death information, anyone with death information (date, place, etc.) is dead—that one’s easy.
2. If there’s not death information entered we look for a birth date, anyone younger than 100 is considered living.
3. The tricky part is if we don’t have birth or death information. In this case, we look at the birth dates of close relatives to estimate a birthdate; if the birthdate is less than 100 years ago, they are considered to be living.
4. If all else fails and we can’t make a safe estimate, we assume the person is living to err on the safe side.
While this is a nice explanation, I’ve found that #3 doesn’t always seem to work. In fact, I’ve seen several examples of ancestors who were born more than 100 years ago and who show up as private.
Could the tree owner(s) have marked them as Living on purpose? Absolutely. Perhaps the ancestor was a criminal, had a shady past, or had misattributed parentage that drastically changed the family’s history, and the tree owner(s) doesn’t want to share that information publicly.
But it’s more likely that this was done by accident. Trust me, we’ve all done it.
Why This Matters
Your public family tree works better – for you and for other researchers – when you aren’t displaying ancestors who shouldn’t be made private.
Think about why you have a public Ancestry family tree in the first place:
- Is it to find cousins?
- Is it to share what you know about your family history?
- Is it to help your DNA matches find you and compare notes?
Anyone viewing your family tree for these and other reasons will find it extremely frustrating to climb your family tree only to find a private ancestor perched at the top.
Here’s an example from my own Ancestry ThruLines™:
It would be nice to know who Ancestry thinks my 3x great-grandmother might be. Instead, she shows up as Private, even though she would have been born more than 100 years ago.
Assuming the owner of Private’s family tree didn’t intentionally mark her as living, rule #3 (see above) didn’t work here.
Frustrating? You betcha!
How to Find and Fix Private Ancestors
Not sure if your tree has private ancestors who shouldn’t be private?
Here’s how to find them.
To start, you need to view your tree as a guest who doesn’t have permission to see living individuals.
Step 1: From the Trees menu, select Create & Manage Trees.
Step 2: Select the tree you want to view (if you have more than one), and click Invite family (Be sure that you are on the My Trees tab because you can only invite people to view your own trees, not trees that have been shared with you).
NOTE: This needs to be a DIFFERENT email address than the one linked to your Ancestry account. If you only have one email address, go to Gmail or any other free email service to create a new one.
Step 3: Select the option to send an invitation by email. Enter an email address in the box and click SEND INVITES.
Step 4: From the Sharing tab, under Manage invitees, make sure the Can see living people box is unchecked. Leaving it checked will defeat the purpose of this experiment!
Step 5: Once you have completed the invitation process, log out of Ancestry. Go to your new/other email account and accept the invitation.
Step 6: Log in to Ancestry using your new account. Make a note of any ancestors who should not be private, and then log out.
Step 7: Log back into your regular Ancestry account. Find the ancestor(s) who should not be private and click Quick Edit. Select the Deceased radio button under Status and click SAVE. You can also do the reverse if a living ancestor was accidentally marked deceased.
What I Found When I Tried It Myself
When I checked my own Ancestry family tree using this trick, I was unpleasantly surprised by a few of my own careless errors.
I had accidentally marked my own descendant as “deceased,” which made her publicly viewable (how on earth did that happen??). Thankfully, I hadn’t posted much information about her, so there wasn’t much to see. I wouldn’t have added her to my tree at all, except we had tested her DNA at Ancestry a few years back in a feeble attempt to interest her in family history.
LESSON LEARNED: This process also works for catching living relatives who may not have been properly privatized!
I also found a few long-dead ancestors who were displayed as private.
For example, in the image above, John Delaney, born c. 1840, has a wife who is displayed as private. When I originally uploaded my GEDCOM, I didn’t know her date of death, so Ancestry interpreted that to mean she was still living.
It would be great if she was still living because I have a lot of questions, but that’s not the case.
Wrap Up
Everyone makes mistakes, and thankfully, finding and fixing ancestor profiles that shouldn’t be made private is easy to do.
If you want your public Ancestry family tree to be useful to potential cousins and DNA matches, check to make sure that no private ancestors are showing up where they don’t belong.
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Elizabeth,
I appreciate your suggestion for creating a separate guest account for the purpose of taking an “outside” view of my tree. I could have used this hint a few weeks ago when someone contacted me via Ancestry messenger complaining about information I had in my tree.
Basically, this person wanted me to set a family segment to private because of concerns about revealing what this person considered sensitive information, e.g., maiden names for mothers of still-living and still-working persons who might have to provide this information in connection with sensitive government positions; this person also pointed out that mother’s maiden names are often used as identity verification for bank accounts, access to various on-line accounts, etc.
I was unable to find an option to set a family group to private but I did set to private the facts I had that revealed the information about which this person was concerned. I let this person know the action I took, also pointing out that the information I had came from publically available information including records readily available on Ancestry, Family Search, etc., as well as newspaper accounts and subscriptions, general on-line searches, etc.
I concurred with this person’s request because it did no harm to my own research (the privatized facts are still fully visible in Family Tree Maker), but since then I am at least sensitive to the effect of Ancestry’s living and deceased settings.
Regards,
Wanda
I’m glad you found the post to be helpful, Wanda. I absolutely, fully, wholeheartedly believe that information about living persons should be kept private. In fact, I’ve found information about myself, as well as other living family members, in the public trees of others, and I was hoppin’ mad about it! The person who contacted you had some valid points, and I think you did the right thing in honoring his/her request.
We must be related! I’ve been chasing “private” down almost every rabbit hole imaginable! But, I am excited to try this app you spoke of- if you listen really carefully, youight be able to hear it downloading in the background!
Lol, that Private ancestor is super annoying! I hope you enjoy the app, and if I do show up as one of your cousins, I hope it’s not through the common ancestor PRIVATE! 😉
Time for people to stop using their mother’s maiden name as a hint for important information.
Thanks for the interesting article. I haven’t tried the app you spoke of, but now I am going to find it…. and when I see my ancestor “Private”, I now know how to handle them. ?
That’s a great method for visiting your tree as a guest. But kudos on using the word embiggen. You made me laugh.
Thanks, DiAnn. I picked it up somewhere on the internet, and it always makes me giggle a little. 🙂
and from there I had to search cromulant.
As in “acceptable or adequate?”
Thanks for this post–great idea to take a closer look at my own settings!
Great post! And a great way to look at your settings and avoid the dreaded ‘Private’ where it’s not needed.
Really good and helpful information once again. Thanks!
Love your post and all the technology tips. 🙂
Thank you, Linda! ?
I am having trouble. Where do I find ‘Manage Invitees’? I have looked through various places and cannot find it.
Hi Howland! Thank you for pointing out that Manage Invitees was difficult to find. It is actually located under the Tree Settings > Sharing tab. I’ve updated the post image to make it more obvious.
Thanks. I am so glad that it was not staring me in the face
You’re welcome! And I hate when that happens, too, LOL!
Elizabeth, I have followed your instructions for this technique and for some reason Ancestry.com won’t except me as a “Guest” to my tree! I have tried it twice now and my substitute email address doesn’t show up in the list of invitees even though the email goes thru and I accept the invitation! Does it take awhile for the information to get into the database Ancestry? Because of that I’m not able to check the box to make sure I’m not seeing living people! Thanks for your help!
Hi Marcia! That’s a new one on me. Anyone you invite should show up under Manage Invitees immediately after you send the invitation. Did you try refreshing your screen? Or is it possible that the email address you used already has an Ancestry account, even a free one?
Alternatively, you might try the new Shareable Link feature to send yourself a link. After copying the link, sign out of your Ancestry account and paste the link in the address bar of your browser. You’ll need to fill out the same form as you’d get with an email invitation, so make sure you’re using a different email address from your regular account. You should see the shareable link under Manage Invitees right after you generate the link.
Let me know if either of these works for you!
Elizabeth, Well it looks like I may have used my “alternate email” at some point with Ancestry.com in the past. I tried to login under that email and they said they would send me a reset code, only it never came to the said email address! So it looks like I am going to have to call Ancestry.com and get this straightened out from their end! I suppose I could set up another gmail address, but that would probably be too easy!! Thanks for your help! I’ll let you know how things shake out!
I too have run into the ‘private’ ancestor (though not on an ancestry tree, but a shred gedcom) and it is truly annoying. I can fully understand some automated privacy settings throwing things off, but it only works as well as the algorithm behind it (and that doesn’t always seem to be working to perfection). This is a wonderful reminder to check and see if your own settings are correct everywhere.
This information was very helpful. I didn’t know how to change things from private to where anyone need information on my family history will be able to look up anything they might for their family trees.
I’m glad you found it to be helpful, Joyce! 🙂
Frankly, I USE Ancestry to make my own private collection of information on ancestors. I’ve grabbed my family tree image (reconstructed into one large .jpg from the sections viewed on Ancestry) and then modified that layout with more text and photos like fixing up a photo. I then created a folder for every person in the family tree so that I can store any research material about that person(s) in their own folder. I then created a very simple off-line web page that has an index list on the left side with name links that when clicked open the folder of that person. On the right side of the page is the whole family tree image. You can then look through the family tree, find a name and go to the alphabetical name list index to find that person and open their folder. The folders hold pdfs and images of documents, notes from relatives, family photos/videos, etc. In other words, anything my research came up with about a relative was digitized and saved in that person’s folder from the oldest to the newest family members. This way the many sources of historical data I found in addition to Ancestry is included in the folder index. For there are folder for maps, group photos, name history, etc. And all this digital information can be copied and shared with every member of the family. And remember, this web page is NOT on the web. It is for local, off-line, private use.