> Then, I remember in the early 2000s when a relative, in her 70s, called me, angry, because I published my genealogic tree online (only with names and relationships).

I had the exact opposite and had to call a relative, in her 70's, to remove me and my bit of the family from her genealogic tree online.

I'm actually surprised that you would break someone else's privacy like that.

> I'm actually surprised that you would break someone else's privacy like that.

I wasn't aware genealogy was private. I'd assume the opposite, as birth and marriage records are public matters. If I were to post a public tree and someone berated me for it, I'd be dumbfounded at their reaction.

in practice, privacy has more to do with availability of the data than having the ability to get the data

Bingo. You're more private if it costs 10x the amount to get at your data. For example, if you have to phone up the records office yourself to find the records, you're not going to wind up with random people being interested in them, generally speaking - but if they turn up on the first page of google when someone searches your name, there's a lot more people are going to find them. Privacy is all about creating friction - similar to hashcash or similar.

> I wasn't aware genealogy was private. I'd assume the opposite, as birth and marriage records are public matters.

And you are totally in the right.

>I wasn't aware genealogy was private

It is if a large part of your family is poor or you're related to a felon or political extremist. Sure it's not as private as bank records but it's not the kind of thing anyone with a brain would want to make it trivial to find.

Public record is not the same as google-able.

Security questions by default often include Mother's Maiden name.

Right which is why that has always been and will always be a miserable security question.

There has never been a point in the past 20 years when someone's maiden name was difficult to find.

> I'm actually surprised that you would break someone else's privacy like that.

Indeed, I sent an e-mail to my family when I published the genealogical information online. She sent me her concerns years later. It seems she haven't paid attention to my e-mail.

The safe default for any kind of disclosure is opt-in.

I don't think so, genealogy goes well beyond the personal interest of some individuals. The main purpose of my genealogical research involved connecting with family members who were "disconnected" and don't know how to connect with their entire family. In a few years this will be almost impossible to accomplish since many of these "links" will be dead.

Yes, well, that may be so but in some cases those family members are disconnected for a reason. FWIW I have a pretty good reason to be as disconnected from some of my family members as is possible and I find it presumptuous of you that you would feel that your research (which you do for yourself, not for me) would trump my personal interests. After all it would be my name, not yours out there. You are entirely free to do as much research about your genealogy as you wish, but there is absolutely no need to do such a thing publicly.

I understand your perspective but it is not my case. The relationship with my relative is good, we live in different countries, and "all" my family was aware of my genealogical research. I didn't give all details about this because the point of the comment was showing how people selectively and inconsistently manage their privacy.

its probably because the bastards were in the tree too

most likely had nothing to do with her direct privacy

I find it a bit amusing you're being downvoted, because while it's certainly possible that's not what said relative cared about, I've seen firsthand how much relatives care deeply about stories of dubious morality several generations back.

My dad was very interested in genealogy, and one of the things that frustrated him for years was a particular dead end:

An at the time young, unmarried woman a few generations back in our family tree had a child, and then moved in with her sister and her sisters husband.

The father was named as so-and-so, "currently employed as a travelling hat maker, resident in Bremen".

A "travelling hat-maker from Bremen" was not particular common in Norway at the time. He should have existed in the police register in Oslo for that time period (people had to register on arrival back then), and he's not. My dad found no trace of him in any other relevant registers from that time period either to my knowledge.

All clues point to the girl inventing this hat-maker to hide that she either didn't know the father or that the father was someone it shouldn't be, or possibly that the father of her child gave her a made up story. At the time not giving the name of the father would have been a crime, hence it was not that strange to see likely false accounts.

But here's the thing: That branch of the family had taken to the idea of a German ancestor that gave them justification for an upper-class sounding double-barreled last name, and even though that decision had been made a couple of generations before my dad started talking about this, that branch of the family reacted with intense anger at any idea that the woman in question had not been truthful, and were furious that he would not let it go. It was already scandalous enough that she was unmarried. That the name of the dad might be fake was too much.

This came up in the 90's. People got angry over something that happened about 150 years back in time, several generations before even the oldest family members involved were born.

Which goes to show that sensibilities around morality has an astounding power over people.

(I still occasionally for fun do searches for the various possible spellings of this supposed hat-makers name, and have not found a single German family using it)

Very funny plot summary.

I'll probably read it.

thanks.

> People got angry over something that happened about 150 years back in time, several generations before even the oldest family members involved were born.

This can vary. My grand-grand-grand-father (Romanian) married a Transylvania Saxon girl who had traveled across the Carpathians in order to run away from her brothers (I think this was around 1880-1890). She was the village's only homeless person, so to speak, had her head shaved (possibly because of lice), nobody was looking at her, apart from my grand-grand-grand-father who chose to marry her. Even though it doesn't paint that great of a picture when it comes to our family's ascendency (as my grand-grand-grand-mother was no aristocrat or anything, quite the contrary) the story got told for every generation since then.

Nice story but the issue in my family was about paranoia and having public information exposed. That is why signing up in Facebook was unreasonable.