Family Tree Privacy: Who Can See What, and How to Control It
A family tree contains real, identifying details about real people — many of them living. Before putting years of family history online, it's worth understanding exactly who can see it, and how to keep it visible only to the people it belongs to.
The privacy problem with a lot of family tree tools
Some genealogy platforms make trees public by default, sometimes indexed directly by search engines — meaning a stranger searching a family member's name could find their birthdate, relatives, and location without ever being invited in. For historical figures, that's rarely an issue. For living people, it often is.
What "private" should actually mean
A genuinely private family tree should mean:
- Nobody can view it without an account and an invitation — no public link that works for anyone who finds it
- New accounts require approval before they can see anything, so a stranger guessing at a sign-up form doesn't get automatic access
- Search engines can't index individual records, since the data sits behind a login rather than on public pages
Family-based access: seeing your own branch, not everyone's
Even within a trusted family, not everyone needs to see everything. A cousin added to help with their own side of the family doesn't necessarily need visibility into an entirely unrelated branch. Family-based permissions handle this by scope:
| Role | What they can see |
|---|---|
| Admin | The entire tree, and can manage other accounts |
| Full access | The entire tree, granted individually by an admin |
| Family-restricted | Only the branch(es) they've been linked to |
| Unassigned | Nothing, until an admin assigns them a family or grants full access |
This means you can invite a wider circle of relatives to help build the tree out without handing everyone visibility into every branch by default.
New accounts shouldn't get in automatically
A sign-up form alone isn't real access control if anyone who fills it out gets straight in. An approval step — where an admin has to accept a new account before it can see anything — means a tree stays limited to people the family actually recognizes, not just anyone who found the sign-up page.
What to check before choosing a tool
- Is the tree public by default, or private by default?
- Can individual family members be shown only part of the tree?
- Do new accounts need approval before they can see anything?
- Is the data ever indexed or shown to search engines?
If the honest answer to any of these is "I'm not sure," it's worth checking directly with the tool before putting years of family details into it.
Build a tree that stays in the family
Private by default, family-based access, admin approval on every new account.
Start your family tree