New Member looking to grow the tree

Question

Good Morning All,

I am new to WikiTree and looking to be as helpful as possible but also safe. I have a decent amount of original records for both living and deceased members of my tree but concerned about posting BC, DC, and other documents for living and recently deceased members of my tree. What is the general opinion of this? Should I be uploading ID documents and other personal info of living and recently deceased members of my tree?

Thanks,

John

Answer 1

I wouldn't bother putting living members of your family up on WikiTree.  They will automatically be set as 'Unlisted' privacy, so only you will be able to see them.  So that won't be very helpful to others (who won't be able to see anything).

Recently deceased? Yes, but keep them Very Private indeed.  But be aware that, if you want to add a DNA test to the site, it will not be able to go to them.

Comments

Great, thank you for the answer!

Answer 2

Dear John,

   Welcome to WikiTree.  There are protections here for living people.  You will be the Profile Manager for any living people you enter on the tree, and much of their information will be hidden from others.  

    If you want to look at my tree, you will see that my parents are alive.  Since they are older, age 72+ in the USA, a bit of their information is available in public records. Since you were born in the USA, I would enter the data on profiles but leave off personal ID documents for anyone that wasn't alive in the 1940 census.  That is the latest US population census that is published.  Just one person's opinion!

    Enjoy WikiTree - it is a great community.  -NGP

Comments

Thank you for the help. I will use your profile as a brief guide.

Answer 3

Hi John, welcome aboard. For Americans, most anybody who was alive between 1850 and 1940 can be documented via the US census.  No need to upload documents, just add links to the documents from the FamilySearch website, which is free.  That site also has many death certificates.  For birth certificates, I wouldn’t bother to upload the document.  You might want to add an inline reference that says “birth certificate of John Doe” or something similar.  I agree with Ros that it is not worthwhile to add much to the profiles of living people because they will be hidden to most others who visit the site.

Comments

Thank you, I will take your advice with Family Search. I will still add the living members so I can recall the information in the future.

Thank you for the prompt response.

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Once you locate a document on FamilySearch, you can just copy the whole “citing this record” part of the page and then paste it into the Wikitree profile.  This will provide both info about the document your are referring to and it also includes a link to the document.

Answer 4

Hello John, and welcome to WikiTree! I suspect the vast majority of us have some sort of living relative and I've really had no issues with protecting their privacy. Living records are locked down to only those you choose to share them with (well, besides the couple of Admins, but that's going to be that way with any site). If you decide you wanted help setting up a living relative and wanted to trust someone, you could add them to the trusted list for the assist, then remove them if you chose to do so. So the control of any living information is all in your hands.

As far as recently deceased goes, you can't keep them completely blocked like the living, but you can restrict them pretty heavily so that about the only thing people can see would be their name, birth decade, and death decade. At the near highest restriction, it doesn't allow you to see much. That's more for others so that they don't create duplicates. We're a Global Tree and our goal is one profile per person on the site. If duplicates are made - no worries - they can be merged together.

Hope some of that helps - enjoy getting your tree underway here at WikiTree!