Your personal data – what is it?
“Personal data” is any information about a living individual which allows them to be identified from that data (for example a name, photographs, videos, email address, or address). Identification can be directly using the data itself or by combining it with other information which helps to identify a living individual (e.g. a list of staff may contain personnel ID numbers rather than names but if you use a separate list of the ID numbers which give the corresponding names to identify the staff in the first list then the first list will also be treated as personal data). The processing of personal data is governed by legislation relating to personal data which applies in the United Kingdom, including the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”) and other legislation relating to personal data and rights such as the Human Rights Act.
Who we are
Our website address is: http://www.closeancestry.com.
The site operates as a genealogy information repository to provide the following:
- Records from various sources, usually from official record sources, including newspapers, as well as birth, death, and marriage records, which may contain Personal Information relating to you.
- Other items which may be of interest to site visitors.
This Privacy Policy is provided to you by the www.closeancestry.com which is the owner of the website.
A description of what personal data the website processes and for what purposes is set out below.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you send images to us for publication, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account, and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
If you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Website traffic is tracked by the third party StatCounter service, which enables us to optimise site performance. The StatCounter service will create a cookie to record your visit to the site. When it is first set, a random ID is generated and stored in the cookie in order to avoid counting you as a visitor more than once (e.g. if you are on a mobile device and your IP address changes while you browse). This cookie also stores a count of your returning visits, but contains no personal data. These cookies last for 2 years.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Contact forms
Contact forms, when implemented, are used to allow people to send information to the administrators of www.closeancestry.com to provide, or request information. While contact forms may contain personal information (such as name, address, email address, telephone numbers, etc), this information is not stored within the website systems or databases. The content of all contact forms are sent directly to the recipient by email.
Automated newsletters
When a new post is created on the site, and you have signed up to receive posts of that particular type, an email containing a link to the post is sent to your registered email address; these are known as Automated Newsletters.
Automated newsletters are provided by the MailPoet feature embedded within the website. Registration for this service requires an email address only. You may register multiple email addresses for different categories of newsletter if required. Each email address is stored within our database to enable the feature.
You can unsubscribe at any time from this service by clicking on the Unsubscribe link shown on all newsletters. Alternatively, you may send an email to webmaster@closeancestry.com requesting to be unsubscribed.
Users who have unsubscribed from this service will have their email address permanently deleted from our systems and databases within 30 days.
Analytics
The website does not collect, store or utilise any behavioural or profile-based analytics. No content is shown to you depending on who you are, or what you have previously viewed on this or any other website.
Page views are tracked by third party services which provide statistics on Average Daily Traffic, Page Views, Unique Visits, First Time Visits and Returning Visits. These services allow us to optimise site performance.
Automated newsletters are provided by the MailPoet feature embedded within the website. The feature provides basic analytics on whom (i.e. their email address) has received a particular email, when it was delivered, and whether it has been opened. This allows us to assess the performance and usefulness of different categories of posts on the website.
Who we share your data with
We will never share any data collected through this website with any other third party.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
If you register for our automated newsletters, your email address will be retained indefinitely until you unsubscribe.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Our contact information
You may contact the www.closeancestry.com by sending an email to webmaster@closeancestry.com.
Additional information
Transfer of Data Abroad
Our website is accessible from overseas, so some personal data (for example in a newsletter) may be accessed from overseas. This also applies to any comments you make against other posts.
Further processing
If we wish to use your personal data for a new purpose, not covered by this Privacy Notice, then we will provide you with a new notice explaining this new use prior to commencing the processing and setting out the relevant purposes and processing conditions. Where and whenever necessary, we will seek your prior consent to the new processing.
Industry regulatory disclosure requirements
The website will comply with data protection law. This says that the personal data we hold about you must be:
- Used lawfully, fairly and transparently.
- Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you, and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
- Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
- Accurate and kept up to date.
- Kept only as long as necessary for the purposes we have told you about.
- Kept and destroyed securely including ensuring that appropriate technical and security measures are in place to protect your personal data to protect personal data from loss, misuse, unauthorised access and disclosure.
Changes to this policy
We keep this Privacy Policy under regular review, and we will place any updates on this web page, http://www.closeancestry.com/about-us/privacy-policy/.
This policy was last updated in April 2022.
And now for a bit of housekeeping
See the wood and the trees
We publish everything we have in our fabulous trees, so basically if you can’t find it, we don’t have it. With over 20,000 people, 5,000 families, 12,000 sources, and 69,000 image references currently sat in our database, you’ll appreciate the amount of work that has gone into this over the years.
You can see more in the Close Ancestry Trees.
Donations
We know that everyone in the world is after your hard-earned cash, but if you do feel a donation coming on as a result of your visit here, then please feel free to send it our way. It all goes towards the upkeep of the site, for which we charge absolutely nothing. So, please help us to keep the site free to use. Thanks.
Contacting us
If you find anything that you think may be of interest to us, then drop us an email at stuff@closeancestry.com
Get updates directly to your inbox
All our updates are also published to my Twitter feed, @PoetClose. So, you can follow me there … if you really have nothing better to do.