Daniel Loftus – Genealogy

To think that this is my first post in almost a year! Oops. I’ll do an update post another time as I want to write about this first.

Now onto the post, with Ancestry announcing a change to their Terms and Conditions (Judy G. Russell covers it here and here) there has been a lot of people withdrawing their media from the website because the update to the terms. I’m one of the people who has done this as I was not really happy with this change and am now looking at a tree with just pink and blue silhouettes (for female and male respectively) But while it’s a genuine concern now we know what our content could be used for if we choose to leave it up there – what would be the after affect because of this? When the news broke on Twitter, I did a thread and in two of the tweets of the thread I spoke about this change from a young genealogist’s point of view.

It’s one of the things I had covered in my presentation regarding using images/media to intrigue and interest the Next Gen but there’s a problem as I mentioned earlier – due to the new terms being in effect, are we unraveling all the threads of work we’ve done trying to intrigue people in the first place? While this may seem like the right option we’re taking the illustrative side of genealogy away. But the fact that the terms are detering people from uploading media in the future, what do we need to expect/be wary of in the future? If this is one outlet that we are “leaving” (I guarantee you I’ll think of the word I wanted after posting this!) then we need to make up for that in other ways, as we need to remember, there are other methods of sharing our family history – that photo with a story you have or a document you had transcribed and don’t know where to have it. There’s places like Google Blogger or a free WordPress website, I’ll cover more ways in another post.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, drop a comment below or send me a tweet. As always, stay tuned for the next post.