Internet Privacy

Watch out! There are a lot of people snooping around on the Internet, trying to locate individuals - and not all of them have the best of intentions. This is important to remember when you begin sharing genealogy data with email (an example from the earliest days of the Web is forwarding a GEDCOM file), social media (e.g., Facebook) or with a Family Tree website. Despite your best intentions, you can inadvertantly be drawn into a situation where you aid identity thieves or simply pass information that was never meant for public consumption. You should ask yourself a few questions before you get too far into the world of virtual genealogy. Do you really want to deal with these privacy issues? Do you have a personal criteria that will assist you in knowing what to share and what not to share? Did you actually get permission from everyone in the family before you posted the family tree on the internet? If the answer to those questions is "Yes", you're way ahead of most folks who are conducting their research on the web. Just remember, you can only control some of what is going on - once you send or post it, it is free to spawn across cyberspace. I'm sure you know what I mean (you do "Google" yourself periodically, right?). Here are a couple of sites to review for more information:

Ancestorhunt.com
Clarence Coogan Web Page
Genealogy.com
National Genealogy Society
Rootsweb

Remember, you just have to be mindful of the risks involved - maybe not to you, but to other relatives (close or distant). Eventually, you will be contacted by someone who wants all traces of their existence purged from your records on the Web. Don't take it personally, they may just not want everyone in the world to know when their birthday is... I recommend you keep the information in files at your house and move on to the next discovery. As a hobby, genealogy has some great rewards - just make sure no one has to pay for them with loss of their privacy. Happy hunting!