RootsChat.Com

People start family history research for all sorts of reasons, one of those reasons is because they suspect something is wrong or something bad happened.  This is a fact I'm not in need of your agreement.

If you're happy to share, which ancestor of yours is it that you feel has been wronged by historians/researchers? I'm curious.

Quote from: CaroleW on Monday 13 June 22 18:21 BST (UK)

Previous generations are long dead so why are you making a point?    Are you speaking from personal experience when you say “they struggled with it all their lives?”

Your post is about Jack the Ripper who was an unknown person from 130 + years ago but you now seem to be extending your opinion re “intrusion” to murder victims & victims of serious crime in general.  Why??

If you are so concerned - perhaps those concerns would be better directed to people who have more authority than Rootschat members (eg) your MP or organisations dealing with bereavement following violent crime.

Yes I take your point. I'll finish my posts here and I will explore more formal paths as you suggest.  Clearly it is very difficult to control crime mystery hobbyists researching family history.

I don’t know what you expect or can reasonably hope for. If you are a direct descendant of someone of some historical interest then all you can really do is not cooperate if contacted about them and withhold any information on your side (eg if you had unique photos of the person or other sorts of items not otherwise publicly accessible).

But there’s (quite rightly) nothing to stop them from being researched by interested parties considering they are long dead.

Has anyone else had this problem? I use Ancestry a lot for research, looking for original documents, such as baptism certificates. This week I have been unable to access the originals of these records.

I am a sceptic, so guessed that the loss of access was not my computer's fault, but a result of "upgrades". Needless to say, Ancestry faffed around with explanations - my account had not been paid, my cache was too full, and so on. Finally, today, they admit that it's their fault "Sources are currently not displaying properly on the older Safari browser versions".

The solution? "If you're using a computer or mobile device that's no longer supported by the manufacturer, consider switching to a device that's supported by the manufacturer." Which I translate as "buy a new computer" ...

Now, I admit that I am a bit of a computer dinosaur - yes my Mac is described by Apple as "obsolete" - but the machine I have does exactly what I want in a way that newer machines don't. (yes, Apple, what happened to the Grab function that I use all the time...?) Am I alone in thinking that the Ancestry solution - buy something else - is unsatisfactory.

Is anyone else, with older kit, having the same problem?

RWT

PS I asked how much of a rebate I could expect ... Hope springs eternal...

I don't use a Mac but are you definitely incapable of updating to the newest browser version on your machine? If so, try a few other web browsers - they're super easy to install.

I used to get irritated when people copied photos from my tree without the courtesy of asking. That's when I made my trees private. Anyone that's really interested has to contact me first. I've helped dozens of people over the years, all of them serious researchers. I think the tree copiers just can't be bothered.

Martin

The etiquette of photo sharing doesn't seem to exist well on these sorts of sites. I know technically once you upload a photo it's free to use etc, but if I ever wanted to take a photo off site I'd always get consent from the uploader first considering they're the effective originator of the physical image. I've only had that happen to me once - a Victorian era portrait I have on Ancestry ended up on Findagrave. I wouldn't have minded if someone asked first - the thing that bugged me more was that he/she had really excessively airbrushed it in some kind of photo smoothing app (to the point of the person being practically unrecognisable). Really not sure why they felt the need to do that given the image was pretty high quality to begin with.

Had a flurry of new matches this past week, although the vast majority don't seem to be bothering to make trees so working out common ancestors might be quite difficult!