At Ancestry®, privacy is a top priority. When building family trees, many people include information about living relatives. To protect their privacy, information about living people in family trees is not automatically visible to others on Ancestry.
 

Who can see information about living people?

People marked as “living” are fully visible only to the tree owner, unless the owner shares their tree with others and authorizes them to see living people (or gives them the role “editor”). To everyone else on Ancestry, living people show as “Private.”



People marked as “living” in family trees do not appear in search results.
 

How Ancestry® estimates who’s living and deceased when no status is selected

To estimate who’s living and who’s deceased in public trees, we use the following (in order):
 

1. “Living” or “deceased” status in the tree. When you mark someone in your tree as living or deceased, we consider that to be their status. To protect the privacy of living people, it’s important that you correctly mark their status as “living”. Do not mark anyone “deceased” who you know is living.
2. Death information. If no “living” or “deceased” status is selected (which happens sometimes when a tree is uploaded from a GEDCOM file or imported from a third party like FamilySearch), we look for death information. Anyone with information (for example, death date or place) in a death-related field is considered “deceased.”
3. Age of less than 100. If no death information is entered, we look for birth information and consider anyone younger than 100 to be living.
4. Ages of close relatives. If no birth or death information is entered, we use the birth dates of close relatives in the tree to estimate a birthdate. If the estimated birth date is less than 100 years ago, we consider the person to be living.
5. Assume to be living. If we can't make a safe estimate based on the above criteria, then we err on the safe side and assume the person is living.

Maintaining the privacy of living people

You are solely responsible for the content you post. Your content must comply with our Terms and Conditions, Privacy Statement, and Community Guidelines. This includes the following:
 

• Do not post or share content containing any person’s personal, proprietary, or confidential information (such as photos of a living person, sensitive financial information, or their address, phone number, or email address) without their permission. In the case of minors, you’ll need the consent of their parent or guardian.
• Only add information for which you have all the necessary legal rights to upload or post.
• Do not mark living people as deceased.
• Do not enter any text (including spaces, punctuation, or special characters) into a living person’s death information fields (like death date or death location). If you'd like to add research notes to a living person, use Notes.
• Add accurate information to your tree.

How to mark someone as living or deceased

Tree owners are responsible for correctly reporting whether each person in their tree is living or deceased. We use those labels to hide (in the case of living people) or reveal (in the case of deceased people) personal details in trees, like their names and birth information.
 

1. In your tree, click on the name of the person.
2. In the card that appears, select More options (the three horizontal dots) then click Quick Edit.
3. Under the Status heading, select Deceased or Living. Changing someone’s status from “deceased” to “living” will delete any information entered in that person’s death fields. This information cannot be retrieved.
4. Click Save.

It’s important to choose the person’s status correctly so that information about living people is kept private. Unless your tree is private and not searchable, when someone is marked “deceased,” their name, birth date, and other details may be visible to others.
 

What to do if you see details about yourself or a living person in your household in someone else’s tree

If you see details of living people in a family tree and you are not invited to view it with permission to see living people’s details, please message the tree owner and request that they correct their tree. If they don’t do so, please report it and provide the link to the tree and the names of the living people you’re concerned about.

Anything that violates our Terms and Conditions, Privacy Statement, or Community Guidelines should be reported.