Terms and Conditions - To Absent Family

General Terms and Conditions

The information and views present in users’ personal boards are that of the individual user, they do not reflect the views of To Absent Family, and we cannot guarantee the factual accuracy of the information they contain.
To Absent Family recommends you seek counselling before and after you view a user’s personal board as you may find some information to be distressing.
The owner of a personal board will not be notiﬁed that you have viewed their board unless you consent by checking the relevant box when requesting access, or by changing your preference in the overview section of your ‘My Account’ page.
If you wish to contact the owner of a board, To Absent Family will only provide each party with the other person’s email address, given that appropriate identity checks performed by an administrator have verified a familial connection between the owner of the board and the user requesting access to the board.
To protect both parties we provide each with no further personal information than each user’s email address. It is up to you to make direct contact via email to establish more complete contact information.
Access to the personal board and user search features of the site requires an annually recurring payment of 5.00GBP and 2.50GBP respectively, paid via PayPal. Automatic renewal of this payment can be cancelled by clicking ‘Cancel’ next to the relevant subscription in the ‘Subscriptions’ section of your ‘My Account’ page.
Failure to maintain payment for the ‘Board User’ subscription will result in the deletion of your personal board page and the data present therein.
Users with the ‘Board User’ subscription may opt to pay a flat fee of 2.50GBP (fee subject to change) for their board to be kept on the site indefinitely in a non-editable, read-only form, for users with a ‘Family Search’ subscription to search for and request access to.
Users with the ‘Board User’ subscription may choose to entirely disallow access to their ‘Personal Board’ by other users. This option may be enabled or disabled via the ‘Overview’ section of your ‘My Account’ page.
It is your responsibility to ensure that your email address is kept up to date as this will be the only information we will provide the beneﬁciary to initiate contact with you. Your email address and other personal information can be edited in the ‘Profile’ section of your ‘My Account’ page. To Absent Family cannot be held responsible for your inability to communicate with another member of the site if you fail to keep your email address current.
By purchasing a ‘Personal Board’ subscription, you as a board owner agree to the following:
- You will not include on your board any of your contact details.
- You will only use images that legally belong to you, or that you have permission from the owner of the image(s) to use.
- You should ensure the information on your board does not contain abusive, indecent or oﬀensive language or images. If a board is deemed to contain such material by an administrator of To Absent Family, To Absent Family has the right to remove any posts they deem contain abusive, indecent or oﬀensive language or images from your board, before the board is accessed by another authorised user.
- You understand that you will not be notiﬁed that access to your board has been requested unless the user accessing it has agreed that you should be notified.
While To Absent Family’s website helps you search for absent family members via its ‘Family Search’ subscription feature, we cannot provide individuals with more personal help in searching than is provided by our search feature, if you need additional help we suggest that you seek assistance from one of the charities or agencies mentioned in our website’s adoption, separation/divorce, missing, and bereavement information pages.
We cannot guarantee that contact with any user or access to any user’s personal board will be requested by another user.

Privacy Policy

We process your personal data with the express purposes of connecting you to absent family members, confirming your identity in connection with the identity of other users when access is requested to a user’s ‘Personal Board’, and putting users in contact with each other via their email addresses given that the identity of both parties has been verified as well as their familial connection to each other.
We only store your data in our own database for the above purposes, and we will never sell your information to third-parties for marketing, profiling, or similar purposes.
We delete ‘Personal Board’ subscribed users’ boards and the posts contained therein as soon as their subscription expires, unless the user has paid and expressed their consent for the data to be stored indefinitely.
We may require a scan or photograph of your birth certificate, driving licence or other proof of identity to verify your familial connection to another user if you request access to their board. We understand that these documents contain sensitive personal information and we promise to delete them from our records as soon as your request for board access has been reviewed and approved/denied by an administrator of To Absent Family.
At any time, you may delete your account and all associated data via the ‘Overview’ section of your ‘My Account’ page, withdrawing your consent for us to store your data.