So here is the question: is this right? Is this fair? Is it ok for other members of Ancestry.com to look at what other members have done on their trees and attach it onto their own?
Why am I so frustrated by this? For this reason, the documents that the other users have attached to their trees are records that have taken me an endless amount of hours researching through the online records on FamilySearch.com and translating and dissecting the 19th and 18th Century Spanish handwriting, especially since I am not fluent in Spanish. So for someone to just come along and attach it to their tree, then to not even do the extra step and add the links that I included that referenced the sources, is very frustrating.
So I made the decision to change my family tree to private.
Now, I am aware that by doing this, this is not contributing to the genealogy community, but at the same time, were those other members contributing to the community by basically copying and pasting other genealogists’ work?
That is my question I am posing here. I suppose I am actually posing a few questions:
1) Is that fair?
2) Public or private ?
3) Does this create community contribution limits or no ?
I had already began placing watermarks on my images I was posting on my family tree online, I wonder if the other users have noticed that yet?
Maybe that should be question 4. Watermarks or no watermarks?
Public tree or private, which do you prefer and why?