Sharing your genealogical research – my thoughts. by Phil Albro
(Warning! Personal Opinion Coming!)
Those who believe everyone should freely publish their genealogical research usually do a great job of dumping a guilt trip on those who see things differently. My observation is that the various reasons people have for not wanting to publish their research are the direct result of effectively unavoidable abuses by people who have no respect for other people's hard work and expense. I can't help but wonder if those who don't mind that abuse simply feel their own research is rather valueless in the first place. This essay will try to make the point that you should not feel guilty, whatever you decide to do or not do with your research results.
I do not count one of the common complaints – the one about people taking the information about living persons from your gedcom and spreading it about. You can't blame them; you had no business, and to my way of thinking do not have the right, to have made a gedcom containing such information available to be exploited in the first place! It is very easy to strip all information about living persons out of a gedcom before releasing it.
Some say they are not ready to release their data, as they know it contains errors and claims with too little supporting evidence. The answer to this is usually that no genealogical research is ever finished. There are always unproven relationships. So you should publish what you have, and everyone will consider it simply a collection of “leads” for their own further research. Does anyone anywhere actually believe that? There may be a few researchers out there who will not simply merge your data into the gedcom they are about to send to Ancestry, and it is only coincidence that I haven't run into any of them yet. Maybe.
Continuing with this theme, a second argument is that many sites allow you to edit your gedcom as you find the need to make corrections, so the incorrect information will not be spread around. Sorry, but my observation is that once somebody downloads your gedcom, they are never going to go back and download the corrected versions. In fact, once a gedcom has been merged into someone's database, while it is easy enough to add more, it is next to impossible to replace what you added previously. Corrections have to be located and made by hand. Few are going to be willing to bother.
I would love to see those places where you can submit your gedcom and edit it at will, add a “corrections only” gedcom capability. Suppose you upload your gedcom and a year later replace it with one that contains some corrected information as well as some new relatives altogether. Fine, the new replaced the old, an improvement. But in addition, there ought to be available a second new gedcom containing only those people whose information is new or changed. Then the “correction” gedcom can easily be merged into the databases of those people who downloaded your original gedcom. That would make finding and removing the incorrect data very easy.
Yet another claim made in support of the idea that everyone should publish their research without delay and without trying to receive any credit for their efforts and expenditures is the claim that your research consists of almost nothing other than publicly available information and is not able to be copyrighted. I have read that “facts can not be copyrighted.” I would ask you, what is an article in a scientific journal? It is nothing but a collection of facts, learned through research. I can assure you, that article will be copyrighted and plagiarism will be prosecuted! Are you saying genealogical research doesn't count? It will be answered that scientific research finds new facts while genealogical research finds facts known previously. Is someone saying that “new” facts can be copyrighted but not “old” facts? That is not what the law says! (Thus I demolish my straw man.) In actuality, if you are the first person to take some existing, publicly available facts and combine them in a new way so that a new purpose is accomplished that was not accomplished by the facts in isolation, that definitely can be copyrighted. And that is what genealogical research often accomplishes. You are not trying to copyright the fact that John and June married May 12, 1876. You are copyrighting the life history of John and June, which did not exist anywhere until you wrote it. Or more likely, you are not trying to copyright it, just be acknowledged as the person who first tracked down all the facts and wrote them up in the form of a history. As you should be. Unfortunately, this is only a moral right, not necessarily a legal right, so it is easily abused.
I have heard people say they are afraid of identity theft through the information available in a gedcom. Immediately others leap in to declare that the contents of a gedcom would not support identity theft. There is a sad but true fact that can be applied in response to that second group – they can't know what some ingenious future identity thief will be able to do with the information in your gedcom! There is no such thing as being perfectly safe in this world. It simply comes down to how much risk a given person is willing to accept – to live at all they have to accept some. Even though the current risk of identity theft from gedcom data is too small to calculate, no one has the right to dictate the acceptable risk level to anyone else!
I have heard it said that you should publish your research to give back something to all those librarians, clerks, looker-uppers, fellow researchers, digitizers, historians and so on who helped you. A little irony there – this is said by the same people who said your research results are nothing but a collection of publicly available information. Therefore you would be “giving back” nothing but what they gave you in the first place, and they already have that! One of the two arguments is necessarily incorrect, and I happen to think it is the second. Your research results are a great deal more than just the collection of facts they contain.
So finally, the bottom line. Or in my wordiness, the bottom paragraph(s). Your genealogical research is distinctly valuable and if done diligently provides knowledge that was not previously available (i.e. knowledge is more than facts – much more.) Your research can not be of benefit to anyone until it is made available to them, and its benefit is as limited as the limit you place on who can see it. But no one should forget, it is YOUR research. No one has the right to say what you “should” (by their values) do with it. What ever you decide to do with your research, don't ever feel guilty about it, and don't ever let those who know so much better than you do, what you “should” do with it, use a guilt trip to make you do something you don't want to do!
Personally, I don't want your data if it comes without notes and source information. If it does have those things, then as far as I'm concerned, it is publishable. Yes, there will be some inaccuracies. There has never been a family tree database without at least a few incorrect entries. If your data is published without source information, no one can track down and correct those inaccuracies. If source info is there, the burden is on those who would use your data, to validate it. You have provided the means. If you publish your sourced data, you do us all a favor. If you don't, you simply don't do us a favor – you're not doing us any harm! Do what seems best to you.
Send Email to: .