I've just been emailed by a guy I hate, his name is Howard Ulph Smith, and he's a Collector, he takes peoples family trees and dumps them on HIS website and claims them as his own, so that if you do a name search his site comes up. Doesn't matter to him that the information hasn't been checked or is wrong or the fact that people are being shown on the internet who absolutely don't want their names on there. What matters to him is that he has them. He's scum, he takes work from people all over the world and publishes it under his name. I've contacted him and asked him to delete my file but he wont, and what can I do?
He's a gatherer, there are a LOT of them out there, people who just keep adding and adding to family trees until they have tens of thousands of names, and who can claim directly very few. People who think the more the merrier, even if it's your 2nd cousins husbands mothers family. This is not working a family tree, this is collecting. I have only 6800 people on my family tree, most are a REAL connection, most names I know and can say "oh yeah he/she was born in " I've researched about 70% of the lines, of course I do more on some that others, but I have sources for all my worked logged on my tree, they're not guess work, they're proven. On quite a few connections I've found double connections, where you go back and this family married into that family and on the otherside married back into it again. Researching the family is FUN, yes it can be frustrating, but it's FUN. Gathering and dumping someones hard work and then preening over it is not good, it's not ethical, and it shouldn't be allowed. Howard Ulph Smith should be made to take his I was going to say "work" but I'll say collectors site off the internet, because people are taking what's on there as gospel, and it will cause heartache in the long run with months of work having to be re done to fix problems created by his lack of care.
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