Privacy

Why living relatives never appear publicly

Genealogy is the one hobby where the data is about other people. How Shajrah handles living relatives, what is published, and how to get a record removed.

Genealogy has a problem that most hobbies do not: the data is about other people, and they did not agree to be in it. Your grandmother’s maiden name, your cousin’s date of birth and your uncle’s village are all facts about identifiable living individuals, and publishing them is a decision made on their behalf.

Most genealogy platforms treat this as a settings problem — a toggle, defaulted helpfully, that users are trusted to manage. Shajrah treats it as a design constraint instead. Living people are excluded from the public registry by a rule in the code, and there is no configuration that turns it off.

What the rule actually is

A person record marked as living never appears in public search results, regardless of the tree’s visibility setting, the record’s confidence score, or what its owner would prefer. Making a tree public promotes the qualifying deceased ancestors in it and leaves everyone else where they were.

• Living people are absent from the public index entirely — not hidden behind a sign-in, absent.
• Where a living person’s birth year is displayed to someone with legitimate access, it is masked to a decade.
• Search result pages and member profiles are additionally excluded from search-engine indexes, so they cannot be surfaced or cached by Google even by accident.
• Evidence can still be uploaded and held against a living person’s record. It is simply not published.

Your own profile is a separate decision

Your member profile — display name, bio, region, tribal affiliation — is yours, and you can make it publicly viewable. That is a genuine choice about your own data, so it is genuinely a setting.

Even then, public means findable by people on Shajrah, not searchable on the open web. Profile pages carry an instruction telling search engines not to index them. Being listed on Google under your own name is far harder to undo than a toggle here, and it is not something the public setting quietly signs you up for.

If someone else has added you

This is the situation the rules above are mostly designed for, and it is more common than people expect — a relative builds a tree in good faith and you appear in it without ever having heard of the platform.

If you are living, you are already excluded from the public registry. If you want the record removed altogether, or you have found a deceased relative published in a way you object to, submit a removal request through the feedback widget with the tree link and the name concerned. Requests are processed within seven days, and records can be anonymised on shared trees where outright deletion would break the surrounding structure.

You do not need an account to ask, and you do not need to explain why.

Deceased relatives are a judgement call

Privacy law generally attaches to living people, and a registry of ancestors is not viable if every deceased person requires consent that cannot be given. But recently deceased people have living relatives with a legitimate interest, and cause of death, estrangements and circumstances of birth remain sensitive long after the person has died.

The practical guidance: publish what establishes identity and descent — names, dates, places, relationships. Leave out what merely satisfies curiosity. If you would hesitate to say it aloud at a family gathering, it probably does not belong in a public record either.

For how records are evidenced and scored once they are public, see what counts as evidence in nasab.