Confidentiality

So we took our first real family vacation since we started this company, where we really left everything and let our employees pick up the slack. Hopefully none of you noticed. While we have traveled more than I could ever imagine with this company, and it's been a great education for the kids, it has always been with the email and sometimes phones attached but this time we left them home. It was blissful, and as any company owner would know--quite a feat.

I have some great pictures of all of us at the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde and Arches National Park. Cute, funny and just beautiful. But the one I'm going to show you is this one:
Yep. Just me. Because our children are still minors, you aren't going to find them in any of our pictures or social networking on the net. I've kept them and information about them very tight to my chest because they are the focus of my life and too precious to treat with even the slightest shade of risk. Now they are getting older, and I'm probably being a little neurotic at this point, but unless you happen to meet them at a conference you probably won't be hearing about them anytime soon.

Sometimes you want to do the same with a genealogy chart. In each of the genealogy database programs, you can mark the people you want to keep confidential. In most genealogy programs it is called privatizing, using privacy settings or marking a person, event or relationship as confidential. Sometimes it is just a setting on who you want to export to a gedcom but then you can send the file to us that way and those people will be excluded. Look up the word private or confidential in the help screens on your program and they will tell you how your program does it.

Normally though, we don't need you to do any special processing before you send us the file. You can send us the actual file in any format, you don't even have to create a gedcom. In fact we would prefer that you didn't because people often inadvertently exclude people they want on the chart. Just send us the whole file and we'll just take out the parts we need. The file doesn't go anywhere else, and we'll delete it in 30 days as soon as we know you are happy with your chart. At that point, we are happy to go in and create a confidentiality setting for all the living people or anything else like that. But we probably won't know which ex spouses you don't want to show, or step children or even black sheep if you are so inclined. So on those you may want to privatize them yourself. Or just let us know specifically who to take out. We're happy to help you any way we can to make this easy for you.