I have been very silly - have frowned on people being careless with personal details and now have done the same myself.  I am on the genesreunited site and having had a successful contact with a second cousin was all happy and relaxed when another contact told me that he hadn't got his tree on line at the moment - could he look at mine and if I e-mailed him at .....com etc he would do all he could to help.  I did think it funny that his e-mail name was different to his contact name but hey - he might be using someone else's computer so I let him have sight of my tree, told him our names and how we were connected and asked him some questions back.  He came back to me with - give me your address and I will send you these 2 certificates.  Well I don't collect certificates from distant relatives - only direct line.  But at this point I suddenly realised he had signed himself by the other name and he hadn't answered any of my questions from my e-mail.  I went into a cold sweat when I realised that I knew nothing about him - not even his name, and he had our names, year and place of birth, our mother's maiden names and nearly had my address - it wasn't going to take much to find it either.  So I have contacted the site in my worry - got to wait to monday!  Meanwhile this man gets back to me with indignation because I had casted doubt on his credibility - told him he hadn't been entirely honest with me (he had a name change due to family dispute he said and had been a member of genesreunited since 1993!!!!!!) when he told me that he had no more information except the certificates to give me.  Well I kept drawing him out by replying and he sounds like a sad man who wants to guard his research and not share it.  I have had lengthy pompous replies from him and it has put my mind at rest that he wasn't gathering information for ID theft.   But how careless I was - I have now found the button for hiding all information on living relatives - it wasn't obvious - had to go into my account.  Beware anyone else if like me you thought that it couldn't happen to you!  It can.  Phew!

Must admit that I although I have been researching family history for many years, I don't use Genes Reunited. I have put a few, very basic details on it - but I haven't persued anything. I think that a lot of people using Genes Reunited are new to family history research and are just out to get as far as they can without doing their research properly (not suggesting that you are Ceejay :) ). I prefer to use the more traditional methods - ie doing it all (mostly) myself and crosschecking any information back to the original records etc. I did once send some information to a fairly close relative of my OH that contacted me via the Internet, but he never even thanked me and I never heard from him again. The good side was that I discovered my second cousin in Canada and we corresponded regularly, sharing information for many years until he, unfortunately, died :( Perhaps other people have had good experiences with Genes Reunited, but I am very reluctant to use it :)

Daisy

No Daisy I have been a member since 2003 and have done extensive research.  A lot of people I have had contact with keep their information on their own web sites or data bases and just keep a presence on genes reunited for the contact. I have had a lot of help over the years.  I have had a lot of time wasters too.  I always get a buzz from getting a contact because one never knows what further information one can get.   I share my information if the person seems genuine and I am glad to help.  However I always check what people give me - one has to go back to original sources.  I prefer to find things out myself in the first instance.  That is the fun of it.  However for instance - I have had photos identified by another member of the family that would otherwise have remained anonymous - so other people can be really useful sometimes.