In my early days of doing genealogy research and building out my family tree, I was anxious to try every new service and tool that popped up. I was uploading GEDCOMs everywhere if I was going to be able to get a different view or analysis of my tree.
These days, not as much. I still get excited about seeing new services and tools, but I’m also much more cognizant that not only may this company not be around two years from now, but that I really need to understand how my data is being used and protected.
There are now a series of questions I go through before deciding whether I want to try out a service:
- Is there a full export capability? If not, how much time do I want to spend putting my data into a system that could shut down without a way of getting my hard work out of it. I ask myself, “What would happen if this service shut down without notice? How painful would that be for me? Would I be able to continue to my work elsewhere without much interruption?”
- If you can upload a GEDCOM as a source file for a tree, are you able to simply re-upload a new GEDCOM and info will remain updated or do you need to delete and start fresh? For instance, Ancestry lets you upload a GEDCOM file but if your primary tree is in different software, you need to re-upload a GEDCOM as a new tree each time. This requires also re-keying the description and re-sharing your tree with people. Note that you can sync you tree via certain desktop software to certain services, but I keep the canonical version of my tree on my desktop software.
- Can my tree be completely private except for select people? What steps do they take to protect the data? Is end-to-end encryption offered? Two-factor authentication?
- What are the sharing options? Does family need to create an account to view? Can sharing be easily revoked, either by removing a user or changing the sharing password?