I was recently contacted by a first cousin - on my mother's side & shares her maiden surname - who was dismayed, not to say angry, to find that googling his own name brought up personal details of himself, his parents, spouses and children from 2 My Heritage trees. I supplied a .gedcom to one of the tree owners but it would have been in confidence. He must have given the data to someone else. Somehow, both the trees seem to have the cousin down as having died which is not the case. I have contacted both the tree owners via personal email in one case & My Heritage on the other with no response from either after a week. The cousin is worried not only about lack of privacy but about identity theft.
When I llok at this tree myself { I have permission from the tree owner I sent the data to] the only person of that surname I see is my mother [died 2005] so how come the cousin shows on the web?
Several questions;
1. Is it likely that the information has appeared because he is marked as deceased?
2. If I do manage to get a response from the tree owners and they delete cousin's entry, will that prevent the information appearing in the future or will the archived page still be found?
3. Would deleting the erroneous death stop the information being public?
Another question prompted by this. I recently dipped by toe into DNA analysis, received my results from Ancestry and uploaded them to Gedmatch. If I wish to upload a .gedcom to Gedmatch, do I have to remove living people myself first, or does Gedmatch have a facility to not show living people? My tree is on Rootmagic 7.
Thanks for any help.