Respecting the Privacy of Living Family Members...

One of the first things I learned in my genealogy courses regarded the ethics of displaying information of living relatives. When a genealogist publishes his or her family's pedigree charts or family history, understanding proper etiquette of displaying living relatives information is imperative. If you happen to publish the birth dates of your aunt and she gets upset with you, she may not want to help you with your genelaogy anymore. Publishing information that helps to identify living relatives can also lead to identity theft or other types of crimes. Paranoid? Maybe. But the fact is that publishing your living relatives private information is against genealogy's ethics.

Last week, I was adding some information for my family on Ancestry.com when I came across another genealogist's information pertaining to my family. This genealogist had my great aunt and great uncle's birth dates for all to see. My great aunt and great uncle are still alive. The genealogist assumed that because they were born in the early 1900s they had passed away. Assuming an ancestor is deceased is never a good behavior in genealogy. Always work with facts. My rule of thumb is if I am not sure an ancestor has died and I cannot find information about his or her death I wait until 110 years has passed before allowing their information to be shown. This large amount of years is probably extreme for most genealogists and is only my personal preference based on the fact that a large number of ancestors have lived into their late 90s and early 100s.

The lesson here is to always respect the privacy of living members of your family, even if your connection with an ancestor is very distant. The genealogist who had posted my great aunt and great uncle's information was not related by blood to either and only had a connection through the marriage of my great aunt's sister. I respectfully emailed the genealogist to let her know that both were still alive and gently reminded the genealogist about not posting information of living people.

I welcome comments to this blog, as I always do of course, but especially this one. I would love to hear how others have handled this important ethical point in their genealogical reports. What is the standard you use before publishing someone's private information?