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Legal Issues

I am not a lawyer or a legal scholar, and since I am creating and maintaining this site as a hobby in my spare time, I don’t have the resources to hire one either. Therefore, I am not able to provide the proper legal phrases for the stuff that follows. However, I will write down in plain language what my intentions are, and since I believe that most people are of good will, I think that will be enough.

Copyright

I have created almost all of the content on this site—text, graphics, layout, etc. Any content that is not created by me is clearly labled, either where the content appears or on this page. I retain all copyright and other rights to this content, which basically means that this content cannot be used by anyone else without my permission.

I hereby explicitly grant permission to anyone to use the information found on this Web site, provided that they:

This permission includes commercial as well as non-commercial use. If information from this site is used in a commercial product, I would appreciate a copy of (or access to) this product. In any case, I would very much appreciate any one who uses or wants to use information from this Web site to send me a note.

Liability

I have done my best to provide accurate information on this site. However, this site is my private hobby, which I make available to interested parties on what I believe is called an as-is basis, meaning that if you use the information found on this site in any way, that is your responsibility. I would appreciate being informed of any inaccuracies or omissions, but I cannot guarantee that I will correct inaccuracies or fix omissions in any way.

If you use anything from this site as outlined above, please include a disclaimer saying that the original information was provided on an as-is basis and I will not be held responsible for it. In fact, I am stating here that any information on this site that I got from others, is provided on the same basis, and neither I nor the original provider should be held responsible.

Please remember that this is a private site, not a commercial information provider. If you want guarantees on accuracyor usefulness, I’m afraid you will have to do your own research.

Privacy Issues

I believe strongly in the right of privacy of individuals. There is a lot of information on this site that relates to living individual people. Although I usually ask people if they object to the fact that I will publish the information on the Web, it is impossible for me to obtain a specific release for each piece of information here.

In general, I assume that it is OK to publish basic information about living people—name, date and place of birth and marriage, family relationships. I addition, I assume that people will not object to publication of information that is publicly available, like phone books or US census records.

Most other information I treat with some care. If I get information directly from the person involved, I will ask their permission. If I get information through a third party, I will assume that that third party has reason to believe that there is no objection to the publication of that information.

There are some kinds of information that I am specially careful with. This includes address information (including Email addresses), medical and legal information, religious affiliation etc. Unless I get the information from a publicly available source, I try to ask specific permission before publishing this kind of information.

For practical purposes, I am assuming that there are no privacy concerns with deceased people (it is kind of difficult to get their permission). However, I will respect any reasonable privacy request from family members or others who have specific reason to believe that the person in question would have objected to the sharing of information.

In all cases, I will provide any sensitive information I have to people doing specific genealogical or other research, where this information might be relevant to their research. However, I do honor specific requests not to share some piece of information in this fashion.

Lastly, anyone can ask me to completely remove specific information about themselves from my database. I will honor those requests. Of course, if later on I receive the same information again, it may be included again.