Why do I get non-information?

A few more information-empty profiles, beside information about some merges with public profiles,

[Private Greoge Moore]

[Theresa Warner Theresa Warner]

[Johnny Warner Johnny Warner]

[Fannie Constance Hoffman Fannie Hoffman]

[Mabel Lizzie Warner Mabel Warner]

Why at all send this information?? The merges are made by a "Volontere curator" but the e-mails are from Geni-Team with "kind regards". Thanks but the "information" is useless as it is no information at all to get these names without connection to anything.

Maybe it would be nice to send a Thank you for the help to lessen the amount of duplicates. I belive I would not have noticed the duplicates if they were not public from the beginning. Or if one profile was Public and merged into a Private and then there is only a bigger problem with all these private profiles. (Today I searched for a person and there was 204 profiles. 20 was public and the rest "184" is kept Private. Many dead 150-200 years ago.

Agneta I looked at one profile to see if I could understand why, as not-a-manager, you were getting notifications.

First before I forget - everyone can better manage their Geni notifications from this menu

http://www.geni.com/account_settings/notifications

Navigating, it is from "account settings" on your own profile, a drop down on the little picture of myself (very cute Corvair car, if I say so myself).

At least on one profile you had done an update a year or more go, I assume on a public version of the profile.

I think you're saying - you could only have worked with it when it was public, and now it's private.

That does seem retrogressive to me also. However I will guess that normal growth and merge activity has "now" brought the profile within range of claimed user's family group.

My experience has been that managers may not even realize their deceased profiles have been defaulted to private.

Has that been your experience?

I'm not sure if I do understand completely what you mean. But mayby it is like you describe a question of the "settings" and that these are changed in the meentime from my merge-claim of duplicates til when the merge is realy made.

It's problematic if not even the close managers of a family do realize what they are doing. I looked some trees over yesterday and the "setting"-possibilities seems realy wide when 3-5 persons claim "this is my private domain/family" and not cooperate and at the same time others in the very same family don't chose the same degree of "privacy" and make their old profiles public. This construction offers the possibility to 30 children or more and a few more husbands or wifes to wach profile than was the reality.

I belive a discussion is needed about how many generations back or/and how old the specific profiles can be to be claimed "private". Of course it's a question of integrity and values. I think it's better to keep old profiles (let's say dead 1950 or before that) public and tell managers to accept that, since noone can be the only relative. In the US-profiles, mostly within the Mormone projects I think, it's better to show publically the correct version (5-15 children) than 30-40 children.

I cannot tell about if other managers don't know or not about the effects of their settings. I've not asked. If I suggest a merge and the only interest of mine is to get rid of duplicates I think it's a Geni-Team problem to solve by informing the users.

My only "bad" experience with merging in my own family is if I have a very open setting and some relative of mine has not i cannot merge since the other manager then makes my profiles private.

Agneta i looked at another of the profiles, and it was born in 1897. That's similar to my grandparents birth date & well within my privacy zone, counting generations. I had to consult 13 cousins about setting to public. :(.

I am even more sure what happened is a merge into a privacy zone. I know one of the manager's, his tree is very "public - and he had a lot of duplicates, and not of close family - so those profiles would default to public. So I believe you, as I did, helped merge those dups together, which is why you got notifications about "this" round of mergers -- which are someone's grandparents.

Is that making more sense?

Not sense maybe : ) but Geni-logic probarbly.

Maybe the solution is that Geni more clearly tells on the Frontpage that all dead are changed into Public and if that not suits it's better to chose My Heritage? It seems odd to need to "consult 13 cousins about setting public".

So it seems as the problem will remain or even develop.

Geni has clearly stated users on Geni will be able to make relatives Private back to 3rd great-grandparent and out to 4th cousin. Perhaps, Agneta, if that doesn't suit you, it is you who should switch to another platform. [instead of Geni changing to suit you]

Agneta when I set up my tree in 2007 on line tree sharing was still a very new concept. I was lucky that a cousin had done a "family study" and was able to port that as the basis of that family side tree. In 2007 there were still relatives not even on email - hard to imagine I know. :)

And separately other related families (my cousin's husband for instance who I've only met a couple of times) set up trees on Geni. It's been a gradual process to ensure everyone is comfortable.

We have consensus (or lack of interest, hah) and everyone's on Facebook. So we are set to public at the grandparent level and eager to make family connections to Pinsk, Odessa, Brody & "Vienna." In fact I cannot imagine how we'd ever hope to make a European connection without those public settings.

But I don't think I could have forced the issue, particularly for those not as adept on Geni as I have become.

Hope this helps.

Agneta - the rule is unfortunately the opposite: All living are forced to be private profiles, unless marked as a Master Profile.

Geni did once play with the idea like others sites that all profiles of deceased people should be public profiles, but it was probably dropped when some of us pinpointed that it would also include recently deceased young people, - children and siblings of Geni users and so on.

At least one extra factor should be included in that rule, birth date, and unfortunately we experience that dates is missing on so many profiles even on current generations because people consider that as a way to protect privacy, and Geni's own estimated date algorithm is probably not precise enough in such situations either.

You misunderstand, Bjørn.

My opinion is "all living" is kept private. Except all managers and users on Geni.

All young, "underaged" not active on Geni themselves should of course be kept Private. And if active some extra protection from Geni is needed I belive. But all adult Geni users ought to be public. Or else it's impossible to know who to cooperate or not with.

Today it's extreamaly irritating to meet "users" and "managers" only presenting themselves with a name. You, probarbly better than I, know that Geni has many Basic-users with several id:s (and maybe an open IP) and the only demand is to register a name.

Today I have had only three mails with information about merges are done and a name. That's that! It's a new fenomenon during the last month from Geni to me (and others?). What's the purpose of this non-information? I did not ask for explanations. I know quite well in what eras I'm moving around and it is not among living!

Today I'm looking for the ancestors of a swedish pharmacist. I have a history and the family did move around early in the world. I find duplicates and profiles between 1700-1850 are kept "Private" (150 out of 880 are public). Among the public the managers have chosen setting with what I call "private" choise. What's the purpose of that?? What good to the World Tree?

Agneta Åhrberg I get many of these notices ( today I had 18)and there is a reason for them. You can click on the link to the profile, then check for data conflicts to resolve. I then check for nearby merge issues and do as many of them as I can. This is a good way to clean up as much as you can of the big tree. It does get frustrating when you find an inactive manager but just report the abandoned tree and go on.

Thank you Eldon, I hadn't thought of those reasons & reactions.

I just worked through one of them and this is what I found. It was a MP with a data conflict, resolved to the MP then found middle and last names in the last name field with no name in the birth name field. all corrected then 10 nearby merge issues. resulting in 5 clean merges, two abandoned trees to report and 5 requests to merge, three of them might happen.

The next one had a data conflict , name capitalization. And one successful merge! Five minutes since I sent the previous post.

Eldon does a fantastic job! But whilst we are all voicing our frustrations, we should perhaps add a 'condemnation' of those Curators who put their baby photo in their portrait. This defeats the purpose completely! If Curators can't put an actual photo in (as Eldon does and many other too) what example are these baby photos for the rest of the Geni Community?

Yes Erica. But it wasn't your Dad's Corvair that was elected a Curator. It was you! And if a 'mere mortal' needs guidance, he (or she) doesn't get that guidance from your Dad's Corvair but from YOU. So, you Curators: don't be childish! Show your true face so that one knows how the person one addresses looks like. If Randy Schonberg and Eldon Clark can show their real faces, why can't Ofir Friedman and those other Curators currently hiding? The Curators ought to be leaders - but leaders at their mature age and not when they still wore nappies!

Sorry Lois, i missed your input on the 6:th. I have very many time thought of changing this platform who is not stating anything clearly at all. But one thing that worked realy good was the access to my account : ).

Actually they sold access to around or above 60 0000 profiles and "forgot" to tell it's only about 20-25% of the profiles that are public. But that was not the issue of this dicussion. It was about all the non-information I do not pay for. I pay for geneaological information and I do like to develop the idea of the World Tree. Within the My Heritage idea is the idea of "My Tree" complete and you're guarranted noone will touch your private domains without you permisson.

Agneta I do not have current figures but a couple of years ago the proportion was 60% public / deceased / connected to the world tree (meaning - managers eager to collaborate & build - and of course many of the living private profiles counted in the other 40% represent collaborative managers ... Hope I phrased this right!)

I do not either have the current figures, but I have a feeling it's worse compared to when I begun on Geni. As I don't work on the young profiles but more often in the time era before 1900 and among scandinavian profiles mostly (or scandinavian immigrants to USA) it's odd to see that what is public information in Sweden is kept private on Geni. In some very public families, as the Noble families it really lookes odd.No one can actually ckeck if the family libes are correct on Geni. And that's a question of quality Geni must make. On My Heritage one can see the same person duplicated several times and that's okej since the World tree is not the goal to My Heritage. Anyhow it now seems as Geni found out it's of no use to send me mails about the "secret profiles".

Last two weeks on searches I've been told there are several hundreds of profiles and maybe 20 of them public. As there are so many duplicates and users feel it's necessary to hide them sleves several generations back I belive it's almost impossible to tell any figures in this area.

Agneta one reason you see more private in searches is because we have made great progress in consolidating duplicate historic profiles. We have a lot to be proud of for that work. I know for me it's finally at a point of filling in gaps (most 18th century now) and getting new historic profiles & trees expanded - particularly in less nobility lines. It's great!

Sounds good and nice. (I've today found a possible Scandinavian connection to US for instance. A little bit to young in US but instead a little bit older in Scandinavia.)

Congratulations! I have a Swedish ex wife of a step brother, so I too have a Swedish connection. :)