There have been a couple of requests on the north Wales lists over the past
few days asking for information about living relatives. Finding a living
relative, especially one who is also a keen family historian, is one of the joys of
list membership, and it's always a pleasure to be able to inform a list member
that you know a living relation of theirs.
However we must be careful about mentioning living people in e-mails, most
list administrators frown on the practice. Apart from matters of personal
privacy, one of the English lists discovered a debt tracing agent masquerading as a
"living family" researcher a couple of years back.
There is nothing wrong with advising a person through the list about sources
for tracing living people such as Telephone Directories, Electoral Rolls,
Personal Adds, etc.
Anything dealing with a specific individual should be dealt with off the
list.
I have no influence over what people do off the list, of course, but I would
advise caution in passing on information about living people off list too. I
would hate to think that we might be conned into advising a brutal husband of
the whereabouts of his battered wife, for example.
If you know a living person that a list member is looking for, the best
approach would be to show the person being looked for the e-mail and leave it up to
them to make contact if they want to, or to ask the person being searched for
if they would like you to pass their details on to the researcher
All the best
Alwyn
Admin:
GWREIDDIAU (Welsh Language Gen List); WLS-ANGLESEY; WLS-MERIONETHSHIRE;
WLS-GWYNEDD; WLS-CAERNARFONSHIRE; BETTON (Surname list)