I am interested in genealogy and posted a family tree (I made in reunion software) online a few years back. I received a threatening letter today from a distant family member asking me to remove their information. I think I originally posted the site with .mac.. and later created a link through iweb. Im not very knowledgeable about web pages and need to know how to remove specific info or password protect the site until I can remove it.. How do I make sure that it is offline or password protected properly?

Dale,
If you posted it on .Mac, and didn't create it within the .Mac interface,
then the website should be in your Sites folder on your iDisk.
If it is, you should be able to edit the info there and resync your iDisk.
This method would not be password protected.

When you create a site within the .Mac interface, you can create a
separate, password protected site.

This involves paying a subscription fee, but you might consider a membership in Ancestry.com. I haven't uploaded a family tree, but I think they have a policy of NOT showing info on living persons in a genealogy. They are listed generically "living person" or something like that.

Lots of genealogy sites out there, but this one is a "quality" site. If someone wants to contact a party who posted anything, they email via Ancestry without revealing a personal email address.

http://www.ancestry.com/

I think they offer a trial membership period - 2 weeks, or so - before you have to commit. There are 2 fee levels: one for the USA, and a second tier that includes more international data. We just have the US membership for now - about $150 or so a year. Well worth it, when you factor in the time and money spent making trips to chase down documents. They are constantly digitizing more & more records, and you can access actual images of census records, as well as other stuff.

Also joined Footnote.com, but I think it is more oriented to making digitized records available from the National Archives & other sources - not actual family trees. $60/yr. Found 8 or 10 ORIGINAL images of pension documents for my Revolutionary War soldier ancestor. Just great!!

Dale, Within Reunion, there is a way to mark a record "Private/Confidential" and then when you generate the site you can have Reunion HIDE the info on the web family cards that were marked Private.

I do it this way and it seems to work fine for those family members with concerns.

The next step would be a have a site that is password protected and you CAN do this with a .Mac hosted site. However, I'm not sure that you can specify it directly in iWeb. I've done it in the past directly via the .Mac website interface for the homepage feature.

To add/confirm what Terry wrote. About 5 years I created a family history web site using Reunion and Adobe GoLive. The web site contains both public and private information. Open to anyone is the "Private/Confidential" feature that only shows "Non-living" people data. All "Living" people data is labeled "male" last name or "female" last name. All "Living" people data is password protected. Also behind a password are pictures and Genealogy graphs.

Yes you can do this in iWeb, individually by site. I'm not in front of the application right now, so I don't remember how you do it, but I have 3 sites password protected and several not. All were done in iWeb.

Thanks for all the great suggestions.. Ill probably remove the site, use the reunion private/confidential feature for the family member that contacted me, then repost it with some type of password protection

I think Ill wait till my one on one session at the apple store to implement them so I dont mess it up further..