May 8, 2026
Many people now save their genealogy on online family trees. There are lots of options on websites such as My Heritage and Find My Past, but, in my experience, Ancestry is the website most often used.
As anyone who has a tree on Ancestry knows, trees can be either public or private. Public trees are the default setting, but it’s easy to make them private. I’m often asked which option is best. Like almost all genealogy decisions, whether you choose a public tree or a private tree depends on your goals.
Beginners almost always think that they want to make their genealogy tree private. This might be because they have the idea that their family tree belongs to them. They have done a lot of research to identify their ancestors and may have spent a lot of time and money in the process. Surely, the end results ought to be private to them.
I remember spending months trying to find the parents of my third great grandmother. The family she married into was well-researched, but this grandmother seemingly had appeared out of the ether to marry her husband. Eventually, my research led me to Ireland, and I made a trip to Belfast to visit the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland. There, I delved into parish records and eventually found records of my third great grandmother’s baptism and confirmation. Those records identified her parents.
I was thrilled to make this breakthrough, but I was also hesitant about sharing it online. After all, it was my hard work, time and money that had made it possible. Why should I just give away the results of my work?
After some reflection, I realized that my third great grandmother had had four other children besides my own second great grandfather. Each of her five children had children. Those children had their own offspring. By now, my grandmother had hundreds of descendants. Each of them had the same claim on my family line as I did. My grandmother’s story wasn’t mine to keep. It belonged to all her descendants equally.
I posted copies of the records I’d found in Ireland online. I won’t say that all the wrong information about my third great grandmother floating around the internet has disappeared, but if I search online trees for her, at least some of them have the correct information accompanied by scans of the documentation I found.
If I’d kept the information about my third great grandmother on a private tree, only I would know the details of her parents. Some people say they want to write a book about their family, but few of them do. I’ve been doing genealogy long enough to know I most likely never will either. When I’m gone, the stories I know will be gone.
By posting information on a public tree, at least I’m sharing some of what I’ve learned. That’s why I believe that public trees are best.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society