Creepy Genealogy
Over the weekend I read about a new genealogy website, actually a controversy brewing over a genealogy website that spends time analyzing the present—and perhaps, eerily, revealing too much information, about you. In the the article a woman did a people search and her name popped up, not unusual as she was an author, but the troubling part was that at this website the names of her children and their ages was listed. So this wasn’t so much about researching the past, but the present. She didn’t want that info out there. I’ve been off and on conducting research into my family. What I find on the web is both interesting and confusing. For example one bit of misinformation about my dad has snowballed into all the websites that collect and generate genealogical information. It started with a misprint in an on-line newspaper obituary and spread from there. He did not die in 2001, but in December of 2011. Yet, now and forever on the WWW he will have died in 2001. That date will carry ...