As an active person in the tree, many a time i am inviting people to 'family group' to enable mergers of trees, as an enthusiastic geneologist, this is ok for me. However other members of the family are complaining about getting reminders of birthdays & anniverseries of strangers. Why cant these reminders be restricted to the first four links, unless the person wants the whole group or forest to be included.
also weekly newsletters carry similar info. While i could be interested to know what is happening with strangers (otehr family members really dont know the people i keep inviting to the 'family group' for the reason of mergers), other members are not so enthusiastic and have even stopped visiting the site.
A solution needs to be found like the 'circles' 'groups' in other social networking sites, where people can chose to be reminded of which family members and that would also help in the cases where there is 'no-communication' among family members for reasons best known to them