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Shaking Your Family Tree

July 9, 1998
	ADVENTURES IN CYBERSPACE by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, C.G.
Would you post personal information about your family -- their birth dates and who they married and when -- on the local grocery store's bulletin board? You wouldn't? Then why would you post it on the World Wide Web? The Web is the world's bulletin board, says Carole Lane, author of Naked in Cyberspace: How to Find Personal Information Online (Pemberton Press, 1997, $29.95). Don't make it easy for thieves to steal your (or your children's) identity by posting your Social Security number, birth date, address and mother's maiden name on the Web either. Of course, you wouldn't do that. However, if you want a real shocker, take a look at the way some naive genealogists are exposing themselves and their relatives online. Moreover, genealogists are not thinking of possible consequences when they take a GEDCOM from Cousin Linda (who got part of it from Cousin Wayne, who received some of it from Cousin Julie) and post it on their home page. Oh, it's wonderful information, right down to the grandchildren's names, their spouses, and all their birth dates and addresses. But, the fact that they are invading the privacy of their relatives evidently does not cross their minds. We do not have the right to share personal information (online or otherwise) about living family members --without their consent. This is not an exclusive Web problem. Do you copy family group sheets and send them to other cousins via snail mail, or share information on mailing lists or newsgroups about your living relatives? Living relatives -- not deceased ancestors -- are entitled to their privacy, so you should not share identifying information about the living, their spouses (and ex-spouses) or their children with others. It is all right to gather and preserve such information in your private files on your clan for future generations, but there is no valid reason to be publishing it -- in books, newsletters, or on the web, or to be sending it to any and every cousin who asks for it and who may publish it with no concern for others' privacy rights. Recently, while gathering material for a book, I examined hundreds of genealogists' home pages, and they are a pretty sight -- for cyber-thieves, that is. In our eagerness to share our family history material and utilize the power of the Internet, we have forgotten that not everyone is honest. If you're an online genealogist, keep these guidelines in mind: -- Do not post genealogical information regarding living persons with an identifier: Instead of saying that Jane Smith is your mother or grandmother, say that you are researching the Jane Smith line, and here is the information you have on her, and where you've looked: -- Do not post Social Security numbers or other identifying numbers such as a driver's license numbers. -- Use utility programs such as GedClean or WebGED:Progenitor to remove data about living individuals from your GEDCOM database before sending it to someone else. That way your birth date and birth place won't wind up in someone else's database who might share it with the world. -- Ask permission before you send a GEDCOM you've received to someone else. That way the originator can keep track of who has their data. (c) 1998, Los Angeles Times Syndicate Myra Vanderpool Gormley and Julie Case are co-editors of Missing Links, a free weekly genealogy e-zine. To subscribe, send your request to: Missing Links Newsletter Return to Myra Vanderpool Gormley Main Page Return to Columns Main Page
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