Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

California Woman Uses RootsWeb to Commit Identity Theft

Federal prosecutors this week charged a Southern California woman with aggravated identity theft and other crimes for allegedly using a popular genealogy research website to locate people who had recently died, and then taking over their credit cards.

Tracy June Kirkland, 42, allegedly used Rootsweb.com to find the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of people who, shall we say, had no further need for their consumer credit lines. She then "would randomly call various credit card companies to determine if the deceased individual had an … account," according to the 15-count indictment filed in federal court in Los Angeles Tuesday.

NARA's Hours Now May Be Cut – Again

UPDATE: See the comments posted by Lee White of the National Coalition for History. You can read his words in the comments section that follows this article.

Privacy International Files Complaint Against Ancestry.com/The Generations Network

London-based Privacy International (PI), a human rights group that serves as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations, has filed a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner's Office. The complaint questions Ancestry.com's new DNA services.

Privacy International believes that Ancestry.com's new DNA service should be stopped immediately until the company clearly defines the service and describes how it is being handled. Privacy International states that questions must be answered satisfactorily before people can have confidence in this new service. Until then, P.I. believes the service presents a number of substantial dangers for customers.

Ethics in Publishing Family Histories

Under U.S. copyright laws, facts cannot be copyrighted. Recent legal opinion has even decided that certain compilations of facts, such as telephone directories, are not subject to copyright.

But what about compiled genealogies? What can I include in a published genealogy without infringing on someone else's rights? And what rights do I have to the compilations I produce?

Draft NARA Digitizing Plan Available For Public Comment

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is seeking public comment on its draft Plan for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. This draft plan outlines the planned strategies to digitize and make more accessible the historic holdings from the National Archives of the United States.

To Cache or Not to Cache: The Definitive Answer

Message boards on genealogy sites and blogs lit up this past week as Ancestry.com announced the new Internet Biographical Collection. The pros and cons have been discussed ad infinitum elsewhere, so I won't repeat them here. If you have not yet read about this controversy, perform a Google search on the words "Internet Biographical Collection."

Many of this week's discussions debated claims and counterclaims about copyrights, legalities and such. I read a lot of these messages but never found any written by anyone who claimed to have a law degree or other appropriate credentials. It seems a lot of people, including me, were writing about legalities without having the academic qualifications to back up their claims. To be blunt, I don't know if anyone was correct. I also noticed that nobody cited legal precedent, at least not with a case title and source citation.

Shame on all of us! We genealogists should know better than to make claims without source citations.

I have now found one case where a court ruled on the exact issue of the legality of caching other web sites' content and on the copyright laws involved. This landmark case should be required reading for all of us who posted messages either for or against the recent ill-fated Ancestry.com product.

Ethics in Publishing Family Histories

Under U.S. copyright laws, facts cannot be copyrighted. Recent legal opinion has even decided that certain compilations of facts, such as telephone directories, are not subject to copyright.

But what about compiled genealogies? What can I include in a published genealogy without infringing on someone else’s rights? And what rights do I have to the compilations I produce?

Irish Privacy Bill Could Block Family Tree Research

Genealogists have written to Michael McDowell, the Irish justice minister, to complain that his proposed privacy bill could put them out of business. They say if the bill is passed they could be denied access to public registers, such as the records of births, marriages and deaths, an essential resource for biographers, social historians and genealogists.

Fired Genealogy Library Worker Files Intent to Sue

Beth Gay was fired from her job at the Odom and Moultrie-Colquitt County (Georgia) libraries. She is well known in genealogy circles as the former editor and publisher of genealogical newspaper The Family Tree. Now Beth Gay is seeking back pay from the libraries and city and county governments that contribute to the libraries’ funding.

10,000+ Genealogists' Signatures Delivered to NARA

This is a follow-up report to several recent newsletter articles concerning efforts to petition the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The petition asks NARA to reconsider a proposal to reduce the hours that the agency's research rooms are open to the public. If you are not familiar with the proposal and the genealogists' response, you can find details at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2006/09/only_a_few_hour.html and at the other articles referenced there.

As we approached the Friday deadline for filing comments, the petition had collected more than ten thousand signatures in only six days. I am very proud of the genealogy community for supporting this effort on very short notice. It is gratifying to see this level of mobilization and response.