LeeHigdonNewellMorgan

Please forgive my words for not covering the entire extent of potential loss. Maybe it is my general lack of experience - in the days before 'DNA' anyway - with genealogists not being willing to share that limits my vision.

Having an adoption in the family can influence one's willingness and ability to share information openly. My grandmother was adopted, for example, and I *may* have experienced a kind of closing-up of communications with fellow DNA-based researchers when they learn of this ... I'm not sure. It probably is not the adoption itself which is the key influencing factor, but rather that these folks simply have no information to offer.

Also, I am uncertain of the best way in which to present my grandmother in a public family tree. Should I go with the surname of her adoptive family, or with another that may have been her birth-name? I have been toying with the idea of attaching her to a woman who may have been her biological mother in the tree that I have now ... to see if this might influence the matches picked up by Ancestry's system. I don't think I'd feel as comfortable about taking such a leap were my tree public.

Oh, I have plenty of skeletons in my ancestral past. The more recent of them are phantoms wearing white sheets, and they cast a dingy, sullied light in my grove, when they once faced the night with such mock power and ugliness.

People seem to be very quick to advise others how they should deal with their family histories and the manner in which they should share them. I believe sharing should be a personal choice and not something which is required or demanded. It is strange that some customers bring the issue of power into the equation here. Then again, a love of control may be a factor in some people's choice to keep a private tree. It's not for me, so I find that hard to understand.

My husband has not yet tested here, but one of my great joys is working on his genealogy. There is a woman who maintains a very extensive private tree, which intersects with his family lines, here on Ancestry. She even has attached to it the death certificates of my late parents-in-law, although she is a distant cousin of my husband. I have written to this researcher and evidently, she does not wish to collaborate. This is where she and I are different - in that she is closed to sharing even with fellow genealogists, while I simply am hesitant about posting personal information openly on the Internet.