Now instead of how much I love my family I’ve had to alter my profile on the free virtual cemetery site, which I’ve spent years updating. Hundreds of hours of work undone overnight. I am now being stalked by another Ancestry member WHO I AM NOT EVEN RELATED TO! I spent the day contacting family & even a beloved family whose been friends with mine since before I was born. I’m pulling DNA accounts, filtering trees. This type of LITERAL S T A L K I N G is considered “acceptable” by Ancestry as “researching anyone who is deceased is considered fair game” regardless of how much pain, and concern there is around the person and their intentions.
It was her sending my a screenshot of my personal address that sent me into PTSD overdrive, after having been stalked by my ex husband decades ago. Not something I’m proudly admitting to ANYone let alone in such a public forum.
WE MUST DO BETTER!
Ancestry MUST do better!
Now my profile reads:
Due to gross misuse of flowers and data contained within them by one person, also imho a breach of trust and ethics usually adhered to in the genealogy community, almost 500 of my flowers have been removed as well as memorials personally created as they have been utilized to track and build a public tree. If I remain using this site in the future, only private virtual cemeteries will be utilized to hopefully protect my activity.
Some memorials will be transferred to family who are ethical and trustworthy so my name is no longer associated with them. All future edits will not be made in my name. This should prevent any potential invasion of my beloved family’s privacy as mine has now been.
Please remember, this site was meant to be a virtual cemetery not a place to stalk people as they leave virtual flowers on the sites in memory of their beloved family. Dropping by memorials with no flowers made me feel like someone had been forgotten to time so a flower, maybe some words, was my way of visiting them if only in spirit.
Having been stalked a good bit of my life, this has created a disturbingly real case of PTSD in a community I came to love. Instead my only focus now is to protect myself & family, then curl up in a ball and hide.
I’m just broken right now. I can’t believe someone would go to such low lengths, with the air of entitlement and have absolutely no remorse. “It’s out on the net, therefore I have the right to ______”
My god please protect each other. Our ancestors, while so important as to who we’ve become today, responsible for our beginnings, should NOT outweigh the responsibilities we should all have in protecting each other who are living today.
Never in my 30+ years of researching have I ever considered quitting all together … until now. Be kind with your knowledge and skills. Protect yourself as if your fellow researcher was a child. That innocence should be in each of us and that’s what we should share. Not this.
Stonz~