Should profiles of deceased be marked as public

I always mark them as public when I find them otherwise. In fact, many of these are zombies (markes as living) when they are actually long-deceased. You have to mark them as public first, then mark as deceased.

Rolana,
this is very much a question of personal comfort with having this information "on display" to the world. Some people prefer to keep the profiles of people "recently" deceased private, as they feel this also protects their own privacy. I think they are wrong in this because the vast majority of this information is already in the public domain. But as I said, it's more about personal comfort/choice than anything else.

ok so if I mark the deceased members of my family tree as public it isn't going to upset anyone. That's really what I wanted to know.

I don't want to discourage you but I want to make sure you're making an informed decision.. public is PUBLIC, including Google search. Make sure there's nothing on those profiles that you wouldn't want the Internet at large to see.

Mike at Geni

Rolana, you can never guarantee that any action you take "isn't going to upset anyone".

As Michael says, public = public. But private does not necessarily mean as private as some people think. Rolana, you said: "My understanding is that if a profile is marked private it can't be seen by others". True the details of a private profile cannot be seen by others outside your defined Geni "family", but the existence of the profile and its close relatives can still be seen in the search engine, even for so-called "private" profiles. Pick any surname at random and stick in the search name box and you will see what I mean: you can see lots of close family information for lots of "private" profiles on Geni.

I'm really thinking about other people being able to connect their family to mine if we share the same great aunt say. If all my profiles are private how can they find them? I can see not making my parents, mine or my children's profiles public, but I don't think one should post anything they don't want the internet at large to see online to begin with. I suppose though there could be a whole lot of skeletons in closets with a family tree but at what point do those skeletons stop being relevant to anything aside from a historical side note

Rolana, even private profiles generally appear in the search engine, so making the profiles private does not stop others finding them. I have found many family and friends in Geni with private profiles, using the search engine.

So there is really no reason to make them public?? Either way is fine by me to be honest.

Rolana,

With my family's permission I made all deceased profiles public. I *want* to connect with more distant cousins and share our bits of knowledge together and collaboratively.

I think the key differences between private and public are:

1. More information can be seen by people who are not in your Geni family group on public profiles than private profiles.

2. If you are not in the family group of the profile manager, you can't navigate round private profiles in tree view, and can't generally click through from one profile to another in profile view.

3. Only your family group can edit and merge private profiles, whereas public profiles can be edited and merged by collaborators and curators.

I think I got that right.

In the shared historic tree, there are many people trying to edit and merge profiles, and private profiles get in the way and are inappropriate.

In your own closer family, it's really your choice.

Why cannot Geni give us a clear description of Public vs. Private profiles and the Pros and Cons of each?