When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information. We understand this is a big responsibility and work hard to protect your information. This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it, and options for managing your information.

We provide a range of services that help members explore their ancestral history and interact with other members. Our services that may include your personally identifiable information:

  • Membership Purchase and Renewal
  • Member Profile
  • Membership Reports
  • Donations to Financial Funds
  • Online Store Purchases
  • National Convention (Registrations, Purchases)
  • Family History Tree Information (Original paper copies, GEDCOM files)
  • Other Family Information (Stories, Photos, Obituaries)
  • Publications (Articles about your ancestors, CLUEs)
  • Library Research Projects
  • Membership Renewal Campaigns

To help explain things as clearly as possible, we’ve added examples, and a definition for Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

AHSGR defines Personally Identifiable Information as everything that can be used to identify you or find more specific information about you. This includes name, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photos containing you, your credit/debit card numbers, bank account numbers, spouses name and addresses, vital records naming you, registrations naming you, family history articles naming you, your shared, or publications content naming you.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us.

The types of information we collect as you use our services.

When you create an AHSGR Website Account, you provide us with personal information that includes your username and a password. Your Member Profile contains your address, phone numbers, email address, and birth years. Dues payment information may include payment details.

We also collect the content you create, upload, or receive from others when using our services. This includes things like emails you write and receive, documents you create, forms you fill out, posts and comments you make on our optional Blog, articles you write or are included in, presentations you create and share.

We collect information about your purchase and payment activity in our Online Store and at National Conventions.

We use data to build better services

We use your information to make improvements to our services — for example, we might use your PII to pre-populate forms so you don’t have to manually type in all the fields. We use your PII to create distribution email and postal mail lists. We use your PII in various internal reports which help us better understand our members.

We use the information we collect in existing services to help us develop new ones. For example, we may use your PII when creating member renewal campaigns, promoting new items in our Online Store or new research records when they become available.

Measure performance

We use data for analytics and measurement to understand how our services are used.

For example, we analyze anonymized data about your visits to our sites to do things like optimize product design.

Communicate with you

We use information we collect, like your postal and email addresses, to interact with you directly. For example, we may send you a membership renewal reminder prior to the expiration of your membership period, provide you with an automated confirmation when you register for a national convention, or inform you about an upcoming exciting presentation.

When you register for one of our events, we will send you a confirming notification, possibly a reminder prior to the event date, and an option to fill out a survey after the event.

Protect AHSGR, our Members, and the public

We use information to help improve the safety and reliability of our services. This includes detecting, preventing, and responding to fraud, abuse, security risks, and technical issues that could harm AHSGR, our members, or the public. We use different technologies to process your information for these purposes. We analyze your content to help us detect abuse such as spam, malware, and illegal content.

You have some choices regarding the information we collect and how it’s used

This section describes key controls for managing your privacy across our services.

Member Profiles have required information and optional information. This information helps us understand our members and improve our services.

Required Information: Some information is required, for example name, address, a phone number, and birth year.

Optional Information: Other information is optional, for example such as email address, maiden name, ancestral villages and surnames.

Optional auto-renewal of annual membership dues. You may opt-in or opt-out anytime.

Optional sharing of your family stories and photos. However, if you share you will be asked to sign a document stating you are not infringing on anyone’s copyrights and we may use your story and photos in AHSGR publications and on our website.

Reviewing, and Updating your information

When you’re signed in, you can always review and update your Member Profile. We encourage you to keep it updated whenever any personal information changes. When a spouse becomes deceased, please update your profile. If the surviving spouse doesn’t already have a website login, you may create one. Actually, you and your living spouse may create your own logins anytime as long as you have different email addresses.

When you share your information

One of our most popular services is facilitating members sharing their family stories and photos. We also collect obituaries to help other members with their genealogy research.

When AHSGR shares your information

We normally do not share your personal information with companies, organizations, or individuals outside of AHSGR except in the following cases:

For external processing

We provide personal information to trusted businesses or persons to process certain business functions for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use a third party fulfillment service for bulk mailing some items. They have access to our respective mailing lists which may contain your email address and, if by U.S. Postal, your address and phone information.

Sharing with AHSGR Chapters

Members names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers may be shared with affiliated AHSGR Chapters for membership purposes and to help maintain accuracy.

Sharing with Village Coordinators

Some members information may be shared with Village Coordinators to help AHSGR understand which villages and regions member ancestors are from.

For legal reasons

We will share personal information outside of AHSGR if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

  • Meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request.
  • Detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, or technical issues.
  • Protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of AHSGR, our members, or the public as required or permitted by law.
  • If AHSGR is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, we’ll continue to ensure the confidentiality of your PII and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

We build security into our services to protect your information

All AHSGR services are built with strong security features that continuously protect your information. The insights we gain from maintaining our services help us detect and automatically block security threats from ever reaching you. And if we do detect something risky that we think you should know about, we’ll notify you and help guide you through steps to stay better protected.

We work hard to protect you and AHSGR from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of information we hold, including:

  • We use SSL encryption to keep your data private while in transit.
  • We offer a range of security features to protect your account. Optionally, we may offer fingerprint authentication or two-factor authentication.
  • We review our information collection, storage, and processing practices, including physical security measures, to prevent unauthorized access to our systems
  • We restrict access to personal information to AHSGR employees, contractors, and agents who need that information in order to process it. Anyone with this access is subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.

Changes to this policy

We change this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We always indicate the date the last changes were published and we offer access to archived versions for your review. If changes are significant, we’ll provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Privacy Policy changes).

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