It's pretty hard to track down all the people that steal stuff. If I went after
everybody that copied hundreds of words of my writing (including my inclusion of a
copyright notice, which does not mean work is not copyrighted without a notice) I'd
never get anything done. The LDS went through the Madison library more than 20 years ago
and photocopied all the family files including several of my families. Never checked with
anybody to see if the owner was living, and they put them into their public library. But
the stuff was so out of date by the time I found it I figured everybody can copy old
inaccurate stuff if they want. I know where I made mistakes and corrected them.
For example, I can tell that virtually every tree on Ancestry about the descendents of
Joseph Hankins and Ralph Griffin of Jefferson County derives most of their information
from my work, whether a direct copy or second or third hand. I can tell by assumptions I
made about some unproved ages and relationships made years ago that I have since changed.
I can also tell because they go down many lines only as far as I went down them.
I use other people's Gedcoms, but only as a method of data entry. I add as much info
as I can to make it different since I often had the names and relationships anyway and so
it's not a copy.
Beyond copying narratives, there's the simple uploading of Gedcom data which has no
narrative. Since Gedcoms often purely names and dates, it's not worth fighting about.
If you've seen the State Farm Insurance add about the "French Model"
there's the young lady who says "They can't put anything on the Internet if
it's not true." I can tell you from conversations on Ancestry's Facebook
page, there are a lot of people who believe that and who believe everything is free.
Generally, people believe the first t hing they are told (family history and all of life)
and shaking that belief is tough.
My favorite recent example of copying from years ago relates to my ancestor John Graham
who died in 1862. Early on, I and other researchers t hought that Tighlman Graham of
Gallatin County and later Switzerland and Shelby Counties in Indiana was his son. That was
before we found the marriage record that shows that Tighlman was of the sons of
John's brother Elijah Graham. There are 73 Public Member trees on this line on
Ancestry and 72 them show Tighlman as John's son. Only one correctly shows him as
Elijah's. Of course, that leads into another issue is all these errors feed into
OneWorldTree which tries to adjudicate ancestry by popularity (OWT is a complete piece of
crap).
I have found the only way to combat this is never give out all my stuff to other
researchers via mail or email. If it's in a library and they copy it, I can't stop
that. But I don't have to help t hem. I will generally send only their direct line;
not all the lateral branches.
The other is to put up detailed trees on Ancestry citing sources (and I don't mean
that bogus system that Ancestry calls sourcing.) I write detailed narratives explaining my
versions of the facts and why I believe the popularly accepted stuff is wrong. And
I've posted images of Bible pages and probate records. I judge by the number of people
downloading this information that it has an impact, more t han I could get by directly
telling others they are wrong.
Right now, I am polishing up a Gedcom about the family Ralph Griffin (1754-1838) of
Jefferson County. And one of the main stories I have written is to note that the widely
accepted statement that his wife was Catherine Munson has no real proof. I think it is
probably true. But that Munson name was a theory a couple of us batted around in the 1970s
and like many theories, got posted to the web as fact, helped out by the fact that the
Munson family assocition accepted it from a researcher without proof when it updated the
Munson Record, a large genealogy. I figure my best way of proving my case is to have more
names, more detailed information about every single person, and more documents cited.
People tend to think the person with the biggest pile of documents is right.
All I can do is present my opinion and support it with documentation. Every once and a
while, I do send messages to researchers letting them know they have stolen my stuff. But
I generally don't hear back from them and it's usually not worth the aggravation
to go further. It's not like t his theft costs me a lot of money; just wounded pride.
Sometimes, sending a loud angry email gets them to take stuff done, however.
-----Original Message-----
From: MaDark <MaDark(a)aol.com>
To: injeffer <injeffer(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Wed, Feb 20, 2013 1:09 pm
Subject: Re: [INJEFFER] OLD SEARCH
Bob, I ran in to a distant relative that had information that I very much
needed. I had contacted her through Ancestry. She pumped me for 4every
scrap of information I had but never gave me any information. She told me her
Dad didn't want any of it public. When I asked her to verify who she was
and her connection to me she said "read my book when it is published". I
contacted Ancestry, sent them copies of the emails and they contacted her.
They revoked her membership. At that point, I made my trees private. I do
release a great deal of information but I ask for verification first.
Ma
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