Genealogy Rights

Your Rights

Correction Concerning Recent Article/Commentary about California and Genealogy Records

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Recently I mentioned that George G. Morgan’s ‘Along Those Lines’ column moved off of Ancestry.com and over to his own blog, and that he was free to comment on anything and everything. I misrepresented an article he wrote about genealogy rights, Ancestry.com, and government records (i.e. government restrictions on records).

There was a very good reason why he wasn’t able to write about the issue in his column, and he’s offered his thoughts and a correction of my perception in a follow-up comment here at RandomGenealogy.com

George G. Morgan’s ‘Along Those Lines ‘ Column – Update and an Important Article

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I’ve been very busy the past few days, and didn’t realize that when Ancestry.com updated their site and moved a lot of their daily/weekly news and columns into their Family History Circle blog, that one of the changes they made – they dropped George G. Morgan’s ‘Along Those Lines’ column, one of the better written columns on their site.

Have no fear, he has started his own blog at ahaseminars.livejournal.com.

You can still read his older columns (they go back almost eight years) at Ancestry.com.

He has a very important column this week, and normally I don’t like to do large excerpts, but this was very interesting, at least the circumstances surrounding it. Once you read it, one might conclude that it’s a good thing that he’s writting his column on a site he controls:

South Dakota, Vital Records, and Genealogists

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Things are getting more and more ridiculous. Dirk Lammers has written an article for the Associated Press, published in the Aberdeen News, Law changes leave vital records indexes out of sunshine, about some of the restrictions placed on South Dakotans who are interested in genealogy. All in the name of security. I can understand not obtaining recent records, but some restrictions that other states (not necessarily SD) are passing are getting really silly (or scary, however you want to look at it). David Bordewyk, general manager of the South Dakota Newspaper Association, points out just how ridiculous this is – South Dakota is doing this, basically in advance of what may or may not happen at the federal level (and don’t get me started on the federal government telling the states how to maintain their records).