Privacy issues

are very important when it comes to family trees. From an unprotected family tree a person might find out your full name, date and place of birth and your mother's maiden name - questions often asked of you when a company is seeking to verify that you are who you say you are. Nowadays, most companies prefer other criteria that you probably won't find in a family tree: your pet's name, your driving licence number, your favourite teacher, etc.

[Incidentally, have you thought about inventing a "mother's maiden name" for the sake of those places where the real maiden name is not legally required - think of it as a password. Eg, try the maiden name of one of your grandmothers or your favourite teacher at school or... Of course, you will have to remember it!]

Apart from fraud, there are nevertheless personal and sensitive issues to be considered. These can be hidden from guests and registered users without access to that information (classified "living") or from everyone (classified "private").

No current addresses (email or postal) or phone numbers are included in this site unless requested by the person concerned.

The two columns below describe how privacy is protected on this web site.

How is privacy protected?

On this site, your privacy is protected by allowing access to information about living people (see next column) only if a person

1. has registered,
2. has been given access to information about living people in their branch, and
3. is logged in.

You cannot search for living people unless you have the necessary privileges even though they are displayed as surname and intitals. You can see them while working through descendants of people (provided they are not classified as "private").

Who can be a registered user? Any one can register. The administrator sets levels of access for new registrations. Family members who appear in the tree and who also share their own family information will normally be given access to information about living people in their own branch (eg, only the Roy pedigree or the Hogan descendants). If the person is not a family member, their reasons for wanting such access and their bona fides will be established before any such access is given. See the Registration section in the menu above.

There is a further level of privacy available to you where no one, guest or logged in member, can see information. This requires that I "flag" a file as private and only administrators can see this information. Visitors and logged-in users alike see no further information. You need to contact me to request a privacy classification, though be aware that if the information is otherwise publicly available (e.g., funeral notice in the paper) there is no legal reason for not showing it. (However, issues of sensitivity will be taken into account.)

How are people identified as living?

1. A person is automatically marked as living who has a birth year recorded which is less than 105 years ago and there is no death year.
2. People who are clearly living but have no birth year can be flagged as living - if I know that, so please contact me if you would like a living person so flagged (or better still, since flagging is not 100% reliable, provide me with their approximate birth year at least);
3. An approximation of a person's birth year based on other information available is sometimes used. These dates are entered as "abt YEAR" (different from "est YEAR" - see the Glossary). "Abt" is not reliable - simply a device to provide privacy automatically to people known to be living but with no known birth date or year.

If a person is not living their full name, photos and notes will show. Their name will be "logged" by search engines and you can search for them using Google, Yahoo, etc.

Guests and registered users without access to living people cannot see any details for living people other than surname and initials and links to other family members, but logged in people with appropriate privileges can (within their own branch only). If a guest or registered user without access to living people wants to search for their own entry, for example, they will need to search for a deceased ancestor and then work their way down through the links.