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A few guidelines and recommendations on what to post and not to post...

Living people:  As all of the information submitted here is accessible on the internet, there may be privacy concerns related to publishing information on living people.  If you include living people in your part of the tree, please make sure you have explicit permission from them to include their information.  The Site Administrator will periodically check submissions for information on living people, and may contact you to verify that this is intentional and with their permission.  There is also a "Living-Private" checkbox which will keep the record visible for you but hidden from the public.

Collaboration:  If you have shared ancestors among someone else's branch... are they lacking dates, places, and other information?  Add it!  Do they lack good documented sources?  Add them!  Do they show relationships that are doubtful, or that have been prove false?  Work with the other researchers to get them corrected.

Third party information:  It has long been a common practice to pass around gedcoms, import them into our own trees, and send them on to others who import the information into their trees, and so on.  This is a good way to perpetuate mis-information as often these records are not being actively researched, updated, and pruned.  It is recommended that any information you enter or import here be only the parts of the tree that you are have researched, or are researching yourself, or that it is well-established information that you have received.

Sources:  Good genealogy research must always have sources recorded.  This system does require that at least one source be added for every new record.  There is no way for the system to verify the validity of the source, and so this is left to you to provide good research behind the information you share.

Duplicates:  As you grow your tree, there will undoubtedly be duplicates where our branches overlap.  One of the main goals of this system is to eliminate duplicates across all the branches and trees here, forming one unified tree, like the illustration to the right.  A few pointers and recommendations:

• Before you add a new record, do a global search if there's a chance that someone else may have this person in their tree.  Then if you do find this person already there, link to that record instead of adding them again.  Then make suggestions for that record or contact the other researcher if you have information to add or update.  More on Linking.
  
  
• If you do find a duplicate between one of your records and another researcher's, you can contact them and decide how to proceed.  Either you would re-link this person's relatives to the other researcher's record, and make suggestions for what might need to be updated, or they would re-link their related records to your copy.  Either way, the point is to collaborate and get the two copies down to one.