I believe in free and open genealogy. Everything you find on this site is free for your use and redistribution. Attribution and a link back to my page (I’m trying to increase my traffic rates) would be nice but it’s not necessary. I don’t have a team of lawyers that are going to come out after you. I want the information to be shared, to be built upon and to be used to connect us all together to tell the family story.
Genealogy is history, it’s our history and I believe that it should be shared openly and honestly in an effort to teach the history to our children and to connect families across the globe.
I’ve run into some very protective, for want of a better word, attitudes from fellow researchers on the net. I purchased a resource whose author tried to limit how many lookups could be given out of a resource. Come again? Copyright law doesn’t actually work that way, I can’t reproduce your work as my own, especially for resale, but it can’t stop me from telling people what’s in it. What if I’m a library? What if I donate it to a library? How can you limit how many people can use a work for research?
I’ve also seen the “you should do your own work” attitude from folks when you’re trying to share resources. I think I kind of get this, even though I don’t agree with it or feel it. People put a lot of hard work and feel like others are cheating when they can look at your work and figure out their own tree. Me? I’m happy to share. I love talking about my research and will happily core dump my findings in response to an e-mail question. I’ve often thought I must have frightened away distant cousins by information overload they get in response to a question.
So feel free to mine my site for data. Use it to fill in the blanks on your tree, even if your tree is completely blank. Pass the word along to others, share my link around the web. My photos are scans of ones either in mine or my families possession. I don’t mind if they’re used. Just try to keep the history correct as it passes around.