[Foundation-l] Rodovid.org, family tree wiki, wishes to become a wiki project

[Robert Scott Horning]

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