How Safe is the Data in Your Online Family Tree?

For most of the past few decades, genealogists have been posting their family trees online at various websites. Doing so has enabled many researchers to meet new relatives, make friends with other online researchers, and enlarge their knowledge of their families’ histories. Experienced genealogists have agonized over the lack of thorough research in many online trees and bemoaned the proliferation of inaccurate information, but the vast majority of researchers have still enjoyed the convenience of being able to attach documents as they find them and pursue “hints” or suggestions. Many of the major genealogy sites have spent years encouraging people to keep their trees online and millions have done so, but at what cost?

There are some important downsides to all this convenience that you might want to consider as your family history begins to grow. 

• Do you have a copy of your family tree on your own computer or is your primary workspace on Ancestry or FamilySearch (or any other website that supports trees)? 
• If your tree is not on your computer, have you given any thought to its fate? 

A family tree that is posted on a website exists at the mercy of that site. If the site gets hacked or suddenly shuts down, the tree could easily be lost. As nice as it is to be able to share your work on one of the large websites, your tree really belongs on your own computer where you have exclusive access to it and sharing and publishing is done at your discretion.

Why has this topic come to the forefront this week? 

At the beginning of August, Ancestry.com announced it was making a change to the terms and conditions agreement that so many of us are guilty of clicking and accepting without actually reading. Thanks to noted genealogist, Judy Russell, and others, this change quickly came to the attention of thousands of researchers. Basically, Ancestry declared that it now had the right to “keep for all time anything that ever appeared on its website.” (Judy G. Russell, “One big change at Ancestry,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 4 Aug 2021).

Ancestry already had a statement in its user agreement that says anything submitted to its website becomes its property to publish, distribute, copy, and use in any way it deems appropriate. The change it attempted to make was to be able to do those things in perpetuity, essentially saying that “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too, even if you don’t want me to have it anymore."

Within a few days, after a furor among genealogists, Ancestry walked back its statement. Now the agreement says that if you delete your content, it’s yours and does not belong to Ancestry after all. However, if others have copied your work or shared your photos or used any part of your narrative in a public tree, those bits and pieces are not your property any longer; they still belong to Ancestry unless everything is deleted, wherever it has landed. 

As Judy Russell said in her Legal Genealogist blog, “. .  if you delete something you shared publicly, Ancestry gets to keep using it until anyone who copied or saved it on Ancestry also deletes it. Ancestry will not take down all other copies of whatever you uploaded that other users are using.” (Judy G. Russell, “Ancestry retreats,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 6 Aug 2021).

How to Protect Your Family Trees

1. Keep your precious genealogy files on your own computer.
2. Make copies of all your files and photos and store them in multiple locations. Use local media, like flash drives or an external hard drive, and free online storage, like Dropbox, for your copies.
3. Avail yourself of your computer’s built-in software (Time Machine for Mac or File History for Windows) for backing up your files and make sure you either set it to be automatic or do it manually on a regular basis (at least once a month, if not more).
4. Consider paying for a cloud storage service like Backblaze or IDrive for automatic backup of your files. It will cost a bit but will be well worth it in peace of mind and safety.
5. Do NOT rely on an online tree to be your primary work unless you understand all the consequences of doing so.