Privacy and Living People in Family Trees: What to Share and What to Hide

Practical rules for handling living relatives in family trees, charts and books: what to record, what to publish, how GEDCOM privatisation works and what the law expects.

Your tree contains your dead ancestors, and it also contains your living cousins, their children and their birth dates. Publishing the first group is history. Publishing the second group is personal data. The line between them is where every family historian has to make careful decisions.

Record everything, publish selectively

Keep full details of living people in your private master file; you need them to understand the family and to keep the tree accurate. Then decide separately what leaves your computer. Every export, chart and book is a publication, even if it is only sent to relatives.

What counts as sensitive

• Full birth dates of living people (a birth date plus a mother's maiden name is a classic identity-theft combination).
• Home addresses and contact details.
• Medical information, causes of death of the recently deceased, adoptions and non-paternity that the people concerned have not chosen to share.
• Photographs of children.

The usual conventions

• Online public trees: living people shown as Living with no details, or omitted entirely. Most websites do this automatically.
• Charts for the family: names and birth years of living people are generally acceptable within the family, full dates are not necessary.
• Printed books: ask. A book can travel further than you expect, and a relative who did not want to appear has no way to withdraw once it is printed. Many authors include living people by name only, with a note explaining the choice.

Privatisation in GEDCOM exports

Most programs offer an export option that replaces the details of living people with a Living marker, or excludes them. Set a rule such as treat anyone born less than 100 years ago without a death date as living. Check the file afterwards; some programs leave dates in notes.

PrintFamilyTree lets you choose, per chart and per book, whether living people appear with full dates, with the birth year only, with the name only, or not at all, so that one file can produce a private wall chart and a public poster.

The legal side

In the European Union the GDPR applies to personal data of living people, including in a hobby tree, once it is shared beyond a purely personal or household activity. A tree shared with the wider family is usually still within that exemption; a tree published on a website is not. Deceased people are outside the GDPR, though national laws may protect some records for a period after death. In the United States there is no general rule, but the same courtesy applies. When in doubt, ask the person and note their answer.

A simple policy you can state in your book

Living people are listed by name only, without dates or places, unless they have agreed to more. Anyone who wishes to be removed from future editions may contact the author.

Print that on the copyright page. It shows respect, it answers questions before they are asked, and it is the policy most families are glad to accept.