ROOTS & BRANCHES

When Lynn Broderick, the blogger known as “The Single Leaf,” asked me to be part of a panel on ethics at the RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City earlier this month, I readily agreed.

I’ll admit however, that I was reminded of an old joke about ethics: “Everyone has them but no two people agree on what they are.”

Broderick had primed the pump ahead of time asking what I considered to be the most pressing ethical dilemmas within the genealogical community.

I chose these three:

• Making sure people have every opportunity to fully understand the potential implications that come with taking a DNA test.
• Correctly communicating to other genealogists an assessment of the likelihood (but never 100% for sure) that paper genealogy is accurate.
• Evaluating the appropriateness of further sharing research originating with others (that is, what are public domain facts vs. what are copyrightable “works”)—not infringing on others but not becoming “information hoarders.”

She narrowed the scope of discussion a bit, honing in on ethical dilemmas of genealogy societies, a nod to my current role as interim executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

She had recruited prominent genetic genealogist CeCe Moore to handle DNA issues, but that still left plenty of territory the live panel including me, National Genealogical Society Executive Director Matt Menashes, and Josh Taylor, president of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society.

I stressed to Broderick that while GSP abides by the standards that the Board for Certification of Genealogists and NGS have put forth—and should be role models through our interactions, communications, and publications—I didn’t look upon our role as that of a “traffic cop,” either.

Menashes noted that NGS probably could give its standards a more prominent place on its website, and Broderick also scored out GSP for not referencing the NGS standards on its website.

Taylor addressed an issue that I had thought about but not reached conclusions on: How many and what type of a society’s website databases should be publicly available for free vs. which ones put behind a membership paywall.

He noted that New York’s policy is that if the databases are of government records created by public dollars, then there’s an obligation to keep them free.

The panel was a follow up to one Broderick moderated at RootsTech in 2022. Last year the panel discussed bullying, Find-a-Grave policies (and its abbreviation), copyright, contract law (terms of service), investigative genetic genealogy, societies, and the many roles that genealogists fulfill in our community.

Legal Genealogists Judy Russell’s closing remarks wrapped it up: “Let’s do it right to protect everything for the future.”

And those words remain the best summary of what ethics and do for the field!