Family history and privacy: what's safe to look up.
Looking up family who have died uses the same records anyone can search: death records, obituaries, graves, old censuses and public family trees. The real risk is the living, because a record of the dead can say something about the people alive today. So the living stay private: FamilySearch's Family Tree limits who can see them, and Ancestral Fire keeps them in your own file and never adds them to FamilySearch.
Two good things that pull against each other.
Family history works because people shared: a census taker wrote everyone down, a family placed an obituary, a cousin put a tree online, and now you can find your great-grandmother in an afternoon. Privacy matters because some of what you find belongs to people who are still alive. Both are right. A good family historian holds both at once: open about the dead, careful with the living.
Why the past is open.
Most of what family history is built from was made to be found: a census taken long ago, a death record, an obituary a family placed in the paper, a name carved on a gravestone. FamilySearch and other archives have put many of these records online for anyone to search. Looking up your great-grandmother is the same search a stranger could run, and the person you find has a family who may want to know her too.
The strongest case for worry, taken seriously.
People who care about privacy make real points about family history. Here are the strongest, and what we do about each.
- “A record of the dead is information about the living.” It's true. A grandmother's maiden name, an adoption, a child born before a wedding, an illness that runs in a family: each says something about people alive today. That's why the living are kept apart, and why a page you share tells you who on it may be living before anyone else can open it. If an account of yours uses your mother's maiden name as a security answer, change it: that name is in the public record.
- “AI companies will use my family's data.” We use AI as appropriate to solve the problem at hand. We don't train it. When you ask something, the AI models receive what that question needs from your tree to answer it, and nothing more. We never share your family, never sell it, and never use it to train anything. Our privacy page says this in full.
- “Once it's on FamilySearch, it's out there for good.” For people who have died, FamilySearch's tree is shared on purpose, so families can build one tree together. Family Tree limits who can see the records of living people, and we never add, change or publish anything about a living person there.
- “Family history can hurt someone who's still here.” Sometimes it can. A record can surprise a cousin or reopen something painful. Look first, then decide what to say, and say the kind thing first.
Nothing changes without you.
- Nothing on FamilySearch changes until you approve that change.
- When we search on our own, we start from people who have died, and a search we send to another site never carries the name of someone your tree holds as living.
- Your family lives in a database that is yours alone. You can download it as a GEDCOM file, or delete all of it, at any time.
Good habits for anyone.
- Leave the living out of anything public unless they've said yes: a posted tree, a chart, a story.
- Ask before you share a living relative's photo or their part of the story.
- Keep the recent generations to the family until everyone in them has had a say.
- Tell the stories of the dead well. They can't be asked, which is why their families are the right people to tell them.
Or just ask.
Tell Ancestral Fire one name, and it reads your tree, searches FamilySearch Family Tree once you connect it, and tells you what it found, with the source behind each fact. A real answer:
(The published Kennedy file, brought in from the first screen.)
The tree at a glance: 208 people · 75 families · born 1728–1984. Commonest surnames: Kennedy, Bouvier, Caulfield, Mahoney, Skakel, Fitzgerald.
What Ancestral Fire showed seconds after the Kennedy family's published GEDCOM was brought in.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: The Kennedy family tree, from Wexford to Dallas.
Keep reading.
- How to find your great-grandparents. You have eight great-grandparents, and you can usually find them in three steps: write down what your family already knows, find your grandparents' death certificates and obituaries (they usually name their parents), then find each family in a census, where they're listed together in one household.
- How to read a census record. A census record shows one household on the day the census was taken: who lived there, how old they were, where they were born, and more questions as the years went on.