What about if you wanted to have yourself on a family tree could you do that? (See my prewious comment)
On 31/03/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Simply asking a person's permission would simply lead to chaos. The person whom you ask may agree, but his brother may not. A 110 year rule may be a little excessive. The US census, for example, is in the public domain after 72 years. BMD announcements in newspapers are all a matter of public record; telephone directories, property tax records and the Social Security Death Index are all publicly available sources of information.
Ec
The point of the 110 rule is that it does fit with almost all known privacy laws throughout the world, and for geneological research purposes is generally not that big of an inconvience. Finding information for people who lived in the past century is usually fairly straight forward and can usually be done by asking a close relative that has personal knowledge and information about that person, or there are extensive public records as you have pointed out. And keep in mind that the "rule" included allowing information about people born more recently, it is just that you had to have a clear death date to do so, such as from something like the Social Security Death Index or probate records (both public domain information as well).
I don't know how useful telephone directories would be for geneological purposes other than to confirm that somebody with that name lived in a certain location, and perhaps they had a close relationship (not necessarily marriage) with somebody else.
-- Robert Scott Horning
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