Dates without a year not treated as Private

[Paul Bridges]

In Jan this year I exported a GEDCOM with Privacy settings to make an Ancestry Tree.
I was very concerned about respecting the privacy of living people.

I have several people in my tree who have Day & Month Birth dates, eg 13 Nov,
but without a year.

I now find they have not been marked as Private in the GEDCOM. Ancestry treats them as Living but not Private.

I think this is a Reunion problem, partly because the Find does not allow a search for a blank year (it allows a search on a blank Date).

How do other people feel about this ?

[Howard Fink]

Re: Dates without a year not treated as Private

I have several people in my tree who have Day & Month Birth dates, eg 13 Nov, but without a year.

I now find they have not been marked as Private in the GEDCOM. Ancestry treats them as Living but not Private.

I think this is a Reunion problem ...

I don't see how you can fault Reunion for this. The Privacy setting depends on knowing how many years ago they were born. If you only had a birth day & month for a person who was born 200 years ago (someone you would not consider private) how would they be distinguished from a more recent person with no birth year? There has to be a birth year for Reunion to know which people were born less than 100 years ago. Ancestry probably considers them Living solely on the basis that there is no Death date. If you don't know a Birth year for people who are truly still living then you could enter an About or Circa year for them. If you do know the year but are leaving it out for privacy reasons, by adding the actual year you will be enabling the Privacy feature.