If you already have a family tree on Gedmatch (a Gedcom), and you know that living people are not private, you should proceed to delete your Gedcom from Gedmatch. The following steps will walk you through the process of changing your living family member’s entries to private. ![]() I hope that someday we will be able to edit our family trees right from Gedmatch, but in the meantime (and maybe forever) we will just have to make sure that our family trees are exactly how we want them before we upload them to the site. And who knows, maybe you will end up liking it – I know that I do!Įasy way to mark living people in a Gedcom as private for Gedmatch ![]() If you didn’t make your tree with Ancestry to begin with, you could still use it to perform this process. I use Ancestry, so the explanation will be specific to that site. The following steps to mark living people as private could be performed on most family tree websites or software platforms. Naturally, I deleted it and began to try to figure out a way to import my Ancestry tree to Gedmatch with living people marked as private. I realized that my Gedcom on Gedmatch had living family members listed, including my children and other younger members of my extended family. It got me thinking about my genealogy hobby, and if my obsession with research and finding the truth in my tree could have any negative effect on the people that I care most about: my living, breathing family. If this particular stranger had had access to my family tree, he might have been able to make up a more plausible story and perhaps succeed with his scam. The stranger asked my grandmother for money to help get him out of an emergency, and my grandmother, very concerned about my son, immediately went to Western Union to wire the money.įortunately, she realized what was going on before they picked up the money, and so she was not scammed out of anything but a few hours of her time. The guy knew my son’s name, but called himself a “grandson”, not a great-grandson, like he is. Someone called her up, pretending to be my son. ![]() My grandmother had an experience recently that made me examine the digital footprint that I leave online. With that said, I believe that you should take the extra steps to protect the identities of your living relatives, as well as yourself. ![]() I wrote a post about this exact issue, where I list several reasons why you should upload a tree to Gedmatch. The one aspect of privacy on Gedmatch that we could all improve, however, is in our family tree (our Gedcom) that we have attached to our family tree on the site.īefore I begin, I want to make sure that I am clear: I really, truly believe that most people should consider uploading a family tree to Gedmatch. The site is very secure, and the information contained within the DNA kits are relatively useless for anyone who isn’t using it to research their family tree or searching for DNA relatives. In general, I don’t think that most people should be very worried about their privacy on Gedmatch. Should I be concerned about privacy on Gedmatch In this post, I will teach you a simple workaround that will help you protect the privacy of your living relatives, as well as your own. If you have ever uploaded a Gedcom to Gedmatch, or are considering doing so, you might be wondering if there is an easy way to mark your living relatives as private from within Gedmatch.Īs it turns out, there is not currently a way to do so once you have uploaded your Gedcom to the site.
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