Main Page

Welcome to Our Genealogy Wiki!

This is a place where you can create articles about our ancestors, and easily link them to other articles about where and when they lived. This wiki is meant to supplement our forums and online tree. You can work wholly within our site, or you can link your articles to sites on the world wide web. And because this is a wiki format, you can work collaboratively with others to create a network of articles about your ancestors, and about those they lived and worked with. As this site grows it is our hope that we will be able to gradually link our ancestors into a network that goes far beyond the simple nuts and bolts of who lived where and when, and a list of begats.

The focus of this site is on capturing the details of the lives of our ancestors, both those historically significant people and the everyday people usually not listed in encyclopedias, histories, or even "people's histories". Along the way, It is our hope that the site will also provide information about the historical and social context that our ancestors found themselves within.

There are several places that you may want to be aware of when you start working on this Wiki. Some of them can be visited by clicking the links in the adjacent "Navigation Menu", and some are unique to this site. They are all useful to those working the wiki.

• Guided Tour — a quick tour of this Wiki

• Help — Somewhere to go to find answers to questions about using this Wiki

• Getting Started — Go here for some guidance on getting started on this Wiki

• Community Portal — Things Useful to Know about this Wiki

• Administrivia — A place to present things you should know, but probably don't want to.

• Help:User page — Suggestions for setting up a user page.

• Genealogy:Contents — General helps regarding genealogy and genealogical research

• The Sandbox — A place to play with formating articles.

• Naming Conventions — for those who want to jump right in, read this first

• Category:Surnames — The fastest way to check for surnames

Privacy

The records here are meant to form a historic record for the families concerned. Please do not include private information about living individuals without specific permission from the individuals. For more detail and reasons, please read our privacy policy.

Cultural sensitivity

Some cultures are sensitive to the recording of certain types of information. For instance, some tribes of Australian Aborigines forbid the viewing of images of dead people. Australian Aborigines request that pages with pictures of deceased Aboriginal people be clearly marked as such so that the user can choose if they wish to view the page. See guidelines on Cultural Protocol.

Surname categories

There is (or is intended to be) for each surname a separate category, which in turn is a subcategory of the category for surnames in general. Edit or create a category link at the bottom of the individual's page to put that page automatically in the surname category.

Alternative spellings

Where you are familiar with alternative spellings (eg Winget/Wingate), please note them on the category page and if possible link to those categories. Other readers may not have known of the alternatives or thought to look there. (See Help:Surname categories for more details about how categories work)

Wikipedia

This genealogical wiki operates under the same license as Wikipedia. As a result text from Wikipedia may be placed on this site if given proper acknowledgment.

All contributions to this wiki are released to the public for personal use. Information found herein may not be used for solicitations.

Genealogy inevitably involves using information from other documents. That inevitably leads to questions about copyright requirements and limitations. For those interested in copy right issues, the following may be of some use:

Here is an article on another site that speaks to some of these issue: Copyright Fundamentals for Genealogy by Mike Goad.

Here is a link to Copyright law of the United States

An ongoing discussion of copyright issues for genealogists on the internet is found at the Rootsweb archive for the Copyright Mailing List.

There is a Supreme Court ruling on Rural vs Feist which deals with copyrighting telephone lists. Such lists are similar to many of the lists presented on genealogy sites (ie, transcriptions of census records, lists of settlers, marriage records etc, and so this ruling has some relevance for genealogists.

There is also a US District Court ruling onthe use of images of uncopyrighted material that may be of interest to some. That may be found at Bridgeman vs. Corel.