IIGS™ Newsletter - March/April 2000
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IIGS™ Newsletter - March/April 2000
When I started out to prepare this talk my objective was to describe how to be an ethical genealogist- that is, what to do and not do to behave in an ethical manner.The first step in that would be to define what ethics is. So, I looked at several dictionary definitions of the word ethics. The multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary defines ethics as "the science of morals; the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty." An old Webster's College Dictionary published in the 1950's defined it as "the science of ideal human character." The Canadian Dictionary says "a set of principles of right conduct." These are all very lofty ideals, but seemed to me to beg the question of how to behave ethically.
I next turned to the codes of ethics to which professional genealogists subscribe. I didn't find these of any greater help. The relationship between a professional genealogist and a client is a business relationship in which money is paid for research. Professional codes of ethics deal primarily with maintaining the fairness of this relationship. This is not unimportant, and there are many useful things for all of us in the professional codes, but most of us don't do our research for money.
A return to the dictionary brought me to Merriam Webster's definition of the term "responsible":
That dictionary defines responsible as:
"able to choose for oneself between right and wrong"I think to be an ethical genealogist is to be responsible - that is, to choose for oneself between right and wrong.
Notice this definition says to choose for oneself. That is, there is no objective, published set of rules. Every individual has a different set of beliefs and will make a different set of choices between right and wrong. What follows then, is not a prescription for what everyone must, or must not do to be an ethical genealogist. I will deal with some things I believe are ethical or unethical, but that is based on my own personal set of beliefs. You don't have to agree with me. But I do hope to stimulate some thought about the subject, and that you may each reach your own set of conclusions about how to behave ethically.
I believe there are three areas in which we have ethical challenges. They are in the ownership, accuracy and sources of our data; in how we deal with issues of privacy; and about how we behave personally - our manners. Part I of the talk will deal with data. Part II will deal with privacy and manners.
Data We live in an age of unprecedented availability and access to data. We are literally awash in data of all kinds - good and bad.
The Internet publishes data widely. A few mouse clicks allow us to copy and modify such data with ease. But most web data is protected by copyright and to copy data from a web page without authorization may be illegal, and is certainly unethical.
This IIGS Newsletter published a note from the editor in the April 1999 issue concerning a copyrighted humorous piece entitled "I Want" by Barbara A. Brown published in the August 1998 issue. Only 8 months later, that article:
"had been posted to 56 maillists, a number of newsgroups, and at least five (printed) newsletters for genealogical societies. In most of those instances, the article appeared without attribution. In some astounding examples, other people claimed authorship, and some even made changes - to add their own list of names they were searching for"Two days after I wrote the above, what should appear on our own Calgary genealogy list but a piece entitled "Wish List" - author unknown. This was yet another version of Barbara Brown's piece. When I brought it to her attention she replied that she had recently been informed of another 17 instances.
She also pointed out that had this been a serious piece of genealogical evidence, such as a will or an extract from a letter proving a relationship, the errors made in copying would have made it totally useless as a piece of genealogical evidence.
The best way to deal with interesting data you find on the Internet is to tell others where to find it - not to copy and send it yourself. That also happens to make more efficient use of your time and computer resources, so you win both ways.
Another ethical issue concerning data is its accuracy. There are a lot of bad data out there. Some of it goes back a long way and has long been proven bad, but it still keeps popping up. One of the great stimulants to genealogical research in England in the 17th and 18th centuries was to establish legal claims to land or money. Needless to say, this resulted in a fair amount of fraudulent data being published. There were a number of books published in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries with genealogies linking families to the passengers on the Mayflower. Many of these were not deliberately fraudulent, but some were based on very scanty sources and some were just plain sloppy work.
Never believe that because something is printed in a book it must be correct. Unless you have personally checked primary sources to establish that the data published by others is correct, treat it with some suspicion. It is not ethical to continue to spread incorrect data. Anything you publish will propagate, and you no longer have any control over what happens to data you distribute, whether it is correct or incorrect.
Let me illustrate with a personal story. When I started to research my grandmother's family, I fairly quickly found her birth and that of her 7 siblings in Pocklington, Yorkshire in the British Vital Records, and soon had her birth certificate. My grandparents' family had been staunch members of the Church of England throughout all of my childhood, so I ordered up the microfilm for the parish church in Pocklington. Surprise - none of their baptisms were there. Now there could be a lot of reasons for that, and I was not especially interested in collateral lines at that time, so I went on to find their antecedents in census and other parish records.
Some time afterward, I was able to visit England and travelled to Pocklington where I photographed the parish church and other scenes around the town. I sent copies of these photos to my 90-year-old uncle (my only living ancestor at that time) noting that this may have been the church in which his mother's family had worshipped before they emigrated to Canada. He included these photos in a family album with a caption declaring this to be the church the family attended in England.
A few years later I became more interested in collateral family lines and collected the marriage records for all of my grandmother's siblings from the Ontario Archives. Another surprise - every single one of them listed their religion as some version of Methodist! I have not yet found the time to check the Methodist records for Pocklington, but it now seems likely that's where I'll find the records of all of their baptisms.
Now, the real point of this story is that at a family reunion a year or two later, my uncle's photo album was on show. When I pointed out that the information about the church might be incorrect, I was informed that couldn't possibly be the case. Surely my uncle must have known more about his mother's past than I could! And besides, they couldn't possibly change anything in his album posthumously!
Always be very careful to ensure the data you give to others is accurate. Always make very clear what is accurately provable and what you may believe but have not proven. Notice how easily the statements above, my conjecture slid into being a fact. Once data leaves your hands you have no control over where it goes, what may be done with it, or how it is interpreted.
Another issue related to accuracy is that of sources. We are all much more conscious these days of the need to cite the sources of the data we accumulate about our families. But many of us are not too clear about what constitutes a source.
Internet web sites listing pedigrees or family trees, CD-roms containing birth marriage and death records, the IGI available through the LDS Family History Centres, and even GEDCOM files received from your friends and relatives are not the sources of data.
A web site can be altered in minutes by its author and leave no trace of what was there before. A CD-rom in your possession may be superceded in only months by a later version and be no longer available to others. Some of the data in the IGI was submitted by individuals who were mistaken about their ancestors.
The information found in these places can be an excellent finding aid which will allow you to find, examine and evaluate the original sources for yourself. It may also lead you down innumerable blind alleys and cause you to waste hours of precious research time searching for information which doesn't exist.
It is irresponsible to publish any data that you have not thoroughly checked for accuracy yourself and, if you have not done the research yourself, which you have not obtained permission to republish.
A final issue is one that might be called misappropriation of data. A couple of instances have come to my attention recently where people have given data to another researcher, who has then (usually without explicit permission) passed the data on to a third party. The third party, in turn, has submitted the data to one of the big copyrighted Internet databases. The operating rules of these databases are generally that the submitter retains free use of the data, but use by anyone else is prohibited by copyright owned by the database owner. In this case, the original creator of the data would appear to have lost the rights to his (or her) own data.
Some ways to prevent misuse of your data in this way are to send only paper charts, to withhold the sources of your data, or in extreme cases to send only sources and suggest the enquirer do their own research. I have also seen a suggestion that you strip all of the day and month information from your dates before sending out data. Paper charts are not nearly as easy to copy to databases as a computer file. Responsible genealogists will not use data for which they cannot establish sources. Sending only sources prevents someone else taking a free ride on your research. Dates without day and month provides a good pointer for someone else to quickly verify your data but makes the data largely worthless for republication or sale.