How do we establish the living cousins in Global Family Reunion?

Question

I am mostly doing backfilling work on the reunion: running down the lines of GGXX-aunts and uncles and finding spouses, children and on from there.

This is great practice for genealogy in general until about 50-60 years back and then it becomes more the realm of Philip Marlowe.

For example, here's two siblings: Sunstein-28 and Sunstein-30. They each married prominent people in the 40's, with wikipedia articles, so I know that each has three children.

These 6 people are basically my contemporaries, and the majority of them are likely living.  Grandchildren are mentioned in obituaries; these are people now in their 20's to even perhaps 50's. I am about to pursue them via newspapers etc, etc. but...

I would like some advice here. I know that what I am looking for is public information, but I do not want to be intruding into personal lives. The goal of the actual reunion that AJ is organizing is to find living people. The goal of his articles is more about the interconnectedness of us all, which is much more where I am.

Maybe you at Wikitree, or AJ himself can give me some guidelines about proceeding into the contemporary realm

Answer 1

Toby, I have been thinking about this, as well, as I have been entering a lot of living folks from trees AJ sent me. I think weshould  trace as far forward as we can, keeping those profiles private with public bio and tree. Then, we rely on AJ drawing and chasing people towards Wikitree so if living members are available, they can take over.

Otherwise, we just do the best we can. Having living individuals in trees is nothing new, but we do want to make sure we are giving them privacy. If someone is young enough to be a child, I just don't add them. Wikitree has a great privacy policy as it is-very little is made public aside from a name, and if you have used the internet to find their information, obviously it available elsewhere, so we aren't creating a new situation for the person.