Re: Magazine article

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:29:43 +0000 (UTC), "Roy Stockdill" wrote:

That seems to me a somewhat sweeping statement. It depends what you
mean by "published".

Any format, but I believe the main thrust of the discussion was
websites.

When I published our family history in a very modest A4, cone-bound
booklet, intended for private circulation among members of the
family, the only complaints I received were from people I had
inadvertently left out of it! And I still occasionally receive
notification when a new "twig" is added, ie in the form of a
new-born child. I've always found my cousins, including the
American ones, to be very sensible about the whole thing and
pleased to be included in the family tree, which is why I find it
very difficult to understand the obsessive and tiny-minded
paranoia over privacy that seems to exist widely.

Just as you find my "obsessive and tiny-minded paranoia over privacy"
very difficult to understand, I find your carelessness of others
feelings and lack of consideration for others very difficult to
understand. I have a damn good reason for not wanting my information
collated and bandied about willy nilly.

OK, so your family, extended or otherwise, were happy about a
privately published book and they may be happy about it being put up
on the net for the world and his dog to see - but that is *your*
family. It isn't every, all or many families and I do not see why
people should be upset unnecessarily.

Yes, I'll share family information with family. Yes, I'll put
information on the net. What I won't do is ride roughshod over other
people's feelings. Nor will I publish on the net anything after WWI
approximately.

If you are talking about published pedigrees of living people who
are famous, [...] Thus, they are fair game in my book and they
must accept that their lives being open to scrutiny is part of the
deal.

We aren't talking about famous, infamous, wannabe famous, well known,
household names or celebraties, wannabe celebraties or anyone else
who is in the public eye. I agree they have to take the rough with
the smooth.

We're talking about perfectly ordinary people with no aspirations of
being in the public eye in any form.

In any event, I find your argument that the living should be omitted
from family trees very difficult to follow. If you omit all living
persons, how are those to whom you send copies supposed to know
how and from which branch of the family they descend, especially
since most of them will not be family historians at all?

I don't see the connection with omitting living people from a website
and supplying information privately to family members. There's a
world of difference between the two. Apart from anything else if
family members aren't family historians, they probably wouldn't be
interested in a copy of the family history anyway.

I have all the modern information and it will get added in due
course, but not now.

--
Genealogy: is it a thing of the past??
http://www.spiritisup.com/colors1.swf
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Closing parenthesis in functions definition followed by its call
    ... "properties of the constructor"? ... Java's notion of static members, ... This pattern of public, private, and privileged members is possible ... The pattern in question is the one for emulating private instance ...
    (comp.lang.javascript)
  • Re: Method of Unit Testing Private Methods
    ... > into the problem of how to properly unit test private methods of a ... I follow the philosophy that, if it's private, then its none of my ... members, via the correctness of the public members that use those ... Private Sub Foo() ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: modular programming in Forth
    ... Foo \ Depends on Foo ... To prevent private members from being used outside the module. ... I feel this is a valid reason for the public/private distinction, ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: (Probably) easy question about inheritance
    ... Typically a matrix uses a two-dimensional array, so it would be private ... I would like to access three data members: ... public inheritance is the same thing as inheritance in Java) ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)