The first area of law they encounter is Privacy. While dead people, except celebrities, have little or no privacy rights, their living descendants do have privacy rights.

What does this mean to you?

Let us follow this example. While researching you find out that one of your not so distant relatives has done something notorious. While this may be of keen interest to you, it maybe something that other family members want to keep hidden. So you must immediately weigh the rights of the researcher to report the details versus the rights of the descendants to keep things quiet.

Here are some guidelines for you to follow:

If the event or activity has already been public, you have almost not restrictions in your research and rights to cover the issue again. But, if the issue or event has not been made public you have the potential of litigation from any family members who may possibly be harmed by the information being made public. You also have the potential of causing a serious family fight if you choose to disclose the information, whether it has public or not. You have to decide if you want to subject yourself to the litigation risks or the disdain of your family. While you may enjoy pulling the skeletons out of the closet, you will soon find one or more family members who are not thrilled with your desire to open those doors.

Not only can activities cause problems, so can any revelations that the family may find distasteful. For instance you might find information about the illegitimacy of a birth or you might find that a relative had a certain religious or conduct preference that might have conflicted with the family norm. All of these things can cause embarrassment generations later. While you may not care that Great Uncle Ralph had a certain live style and or affiliations, others in the family may care. What is a simple fact to you becomes a nightmare to them.

The second main area of law that the Genealogist encounters is that of Copyright. All Genealogists in their search encounter various source documents that they must rely on. Most of these documents are copyright protected. So you as the Genealogist must learn the proper way to cite these outside documents and give proper credit to their originators, especially if you intend to publish your research at any time.

There is only one exception to standard citation of source. The exception is when you receive information from another researcher. If possible you should cite that source and their originating sources, in order to show a proper audit trail of the information. In this case you are not necessarily worried about protecting a copyright, you are more concerned about noting the data trail. In this protection of data trail you may encounter secondary information sources that do need to be cited as copyrighted material.

Exception!! Abstraction of data received from another researcher is not copyright protected. But you should still list the researcher as the source. If you receive a small piece of data from someone they cannot declare copyright on that piece of data. But, if they send you a book that they wrote about a family line and you use pieces of that book, then they do hold copyright to that book and you must give them proper citation.

Under current US law, data bases ARE NOT copyright protected !

But, if a person takes a data base, formats it and publishes it in a compilation of any type, book, pamphlet, summary or other form, then that compilation is copyright protected. A simple example of this is a telephone book. While the data contained in the telephone book itself is not copyright protected, the format of the book is protected.

The third area of law that you may encounter as a Genealogist is that of descendancy and rights of heirs. What this means, is while you are researching, you happen to discover a will or a deed where specific items or property where suppose to be transferred to specific individuals. For one reason or another in that time period, those transfers did not take place. In your research you have found a proper trail of individuals to facilitate those transfers. Your research can be submitted to help properly execute the original document, as it should have been done in the first place.

There are legitimate Genealogists who do nothing but trace these type of situations for families, but beware of anyone who sends you unsolicited claims of inheritance. There are companies that make millions every year selling generalized ancestry books hidden behind slick sales materials and false claims. Most of these books are nothing more than abstracts from phone books with a false crest attached to make them seem legitimate. These books are a waste of money.

Yes, if you take Genealogy seriously you may feel like you need a law degree to keep everything straight. It really is not as bad as it seems, if you remember to give credit where credit is due and not to publish anything that would totally infuriate someone enough to bring litigation.