During my searching through the genealogy and ancestry websites I discovered that if I searched on my own name and my parents' names, some of the hits I got (on ancestry.com) were of old, scanned yearbooks from high school and college. While I was delighted to find a bunch of pictures of my mom and dad as teenagers, it did feel a bit like an invasion of their privacy. All the other faces and names were anonymous to me, but there were mom and dad, before they knew each other, extremely innocent and minding their own business in the early 1950s. When I found my own high school picture from senior year, the feeling intensified.
I wouldn't want anyone tracking my heritage down publicly without my permission, but one of the reasons for doing this is to provide a contact point for anyone out there who is distantly related and doing a similar exercise. On the geneaology sites, when people post their own family trees to share (within that site, although general search engines do pick up results from some of them), they often mark those still living as "private" so you can't see the names. Makes sense. In some cases previous generations are also marked private, and only the names from 100+ years ago are shared openly.
Maybe I shouldn't be posting details of "every single Podjazd" from 1800 to 1945 in a blog. Maybe I should just stick to interesting tidbits gathered along the way of the research, or just the really old generations whose private identity has no risk of being compromised.
I'll have to think about it.
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