The most famous online service, eBay, enjoys an excellent reputation. Indeed, the company vigorously works at eliminating misleading claims on its very popular Web site. Still, some questionable sales do get made. My gripe is not with eBay itself, but rather with one or two of the "merchants" who sell on eBay. I am amazed that small-time operators actually sell family group sheets there. Family group sheets are forms that list a family, showing parents’ and children’s names along with dates and places of birth, marriage, and death, if known.

Anyone, you or I included, can go onto a popular genealogy Web site, download information, enter the data into a genealogy program and then print this free data in family group sheets. In theory, we could even sell it on eBay. I will quickly caution you to not do that, however. There are copyright laws involved, which I will discuss in a future newsletter. If you obtain your information from an online site and then re-sell it, you will be in violation of copyright laws. The online merchants on eBay do not mention where they obtained the data. Hopefully, it came from legal sources, not from online Web sites.

You can find these family group sheets yourself easily. Go to eBay and do a search on "family group sheets." You will probably find quite a few being offered for sale at any given time. Prices on these family group sheets seem to start at $10 and then are often bid up by gullible bidders to $25 or more.

I will admit that most of the family group sheets I have seen listed for sale on eBay do appear to be accurately described. I also have to admit that there is no law against this, assuming the original data was obtained from legal sources. Yet I also note that the sellers do not mention the fact that similar information, often in much larger quantities, is available online at no charge. Why pay $10 or $25 for a few printed family group sheets of a certain family name when you can access hundreds or even thousands of similar family group sheets of the same name at no charge on FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, RootsWeb.com, Genealogy.com, or other such online databases?

Yes, it is possible that a printed family group sheet sold for $25 just might have a family listed that is not available elsewhere. But does that slim possibility make the value of the product worth the prices asked? I don’t think so.

I believe the people selling family group sheets for a price are probably not breaking laws, but they are taking advantage of gullible bidders. Once again, let the buyer beware.