My cousin and I had a rare chance to visit the other day. We started talking about family stuff. We realized that we were fairly confused about exactly how our various family members are related and what our roots are. We sent out some emails to our respective parents, mining for information. What we got back complicated things further, however, so I decided to use an online program to make a family tree. (Gene.com). It works like Facebook, where you can only view another person’s tree if you have been invited. I invited the family members I had email addresses for so that they could make corrections as needed.
About a week later, after tracking down some unusual edits from one person I invited, I discovered that several members of the family were deeply offended that I had put their names and the names of some other distant relatives on the internet without asking them first. These were people that I had not invited in the first place because I didn’t have email contacts for them. Or because some of them were dead. Apparently, I was supposed to ask their descendants for permission.
So, a bit puzzled by the outrage, I took the page down. I even took the extra steps of contacting the offended parties by phone to apologize for assuming they’d be ok with the project and clarify that I didn’t post anything in an unsecured fashion and that what I did put up was publicly available information, anyhow.
In return, I have been either: berated, told I was putting their identities up for theft, told that it was not my place to go asking such things, belittled for asking my dad for information because Random-Aunt-whom-I’ve-spoken-to-once-ever has already researched all of this, accused of attacking their culture and heritage, and hung-up on and ignored.
Now, I think they are wrong, but I can see where they are coming from about the possible identity theft aspect. Kind of. The other stuff seems from left field to me. Am I wrong? Was I a horrible jerk?
