I think I remember you being in the UK. If so and your road B is a heavily traveled road, then I’d bet they’re in the process of making the road narrower or maybe putting in traffic calming diversions. It encourages the riff-raff to go by a different route and solves any excessive traffic issues there might be. I love the British mind-set.
Sorry this is long, but I’m pissed.
Normally I’m live and let live on hobbies. You want to mountain climb? Collect stamps? Crochet stuffed animals? Fine, have at it. I’ve no interest, but you do you.
But that laissez faire does NOT extend to genealogists! ESPECIALLY to the damn Mormon ones who are unfortunately related to me. :mad::mad:
The ‘other side’ of my mother’s family converted to Mormonism sometime back in the forties, while my mother and her brother remained Methodists throughout their lives. As far as she was concerned, Mormons are NOT Christians and are nothing more than a god-forsaken cult, and she wanted nothing to do with them.
(Please let’s not debate whether that opinion is correct or not, I’m just reporting on what she frequently ranted to me about the subject, especially in her last years when her Alzheimer’s got bad and for some reason the events of the in-family religious schism became ‘recent’ in her mind.)
Apparently one of the men from that side of the family became an absolute nutter about tracing his family’s ‘heritage.’ We started getting letters from him requesting details of my parent’s and our lives maybe ten years back. He wanted not just births/deaths/dates of marriage but details of EVERY city we had lived in AND when we’d moved to and from there! Plus details of what schools they and their children had attended, what if any college/universities, what degrees obtained, what careers we pursued and what companies we’d worked for!
Now, none of this is particularly secret, in fact, I bet it’s all recorded in official records scattered around the country, but what the hell has any of this to do with HIM? I think the government does less snooping when you apply for security clearances.
Anyway, I answered the first letter – gave him the birth/death/married type info as it stood then, but told him I had no idea which/how many cities my parents had ever lived in (My father was one of those ‘company men’ and had crisscrossed the country over the years.) and was not interested in researching it. And saw no reason for him to pry into all the rest, especially about the descendants. Expressed as nicely as I could, I pointed out that we were total strangers to each other and that was fine by me.
Which of course wasn’t the end of it. <sigh> We’d get a letter or two every year, asking for info, pleading, pushing. I ignored them all after the first one. A few years back he somehow got our unlisted telephone number and started calling with similar demands. I repeated that I had no interest in genealogy, and please leave us alone, and thereafter just hung up when I realized it was him.
So. There’s been no contacts for the last two years or son. Great! But today I received a 10X13 envelope from what appears to be one of his sons. His father has developed health problems and his ‘dying wish’ is that his magnum opus, the history of our (not at all) famous family be finished and … recorded? it says, I don’t really know what he means by that. So enclosed is the material his father collected on our side of the family, would I please look it over and make any corrections or additions to complete it?
It’s a printout, about twenty pages of details about my parents, myself and my husband, my siblings and their spouses and children and grandchildren. Names, dates of birth, places they’ve lived, education, who they married, their children, current addresses! telephone numbers! employers!
And it’s not like a real biography, no real text, no attempt at telling a story. Just pages of the sort of details that anyone trying to hack our financial accounts would salivate over! Nobody else would ever look at it, why should they? None of us are famous, or infamous for that matter!
What the hell???
I’ve got a call into our lawyer. Surely he can’t collect all this info and publish it without our permission, can he?
I am in the UK, yeah; they’ve done the traffic [del]infuriating[/del] calming stuff on my street, but not on road B- if they make that road any narrower, it’ll be one lane for both directions and the only other route would be to go round the other 3 sides of the square, adding over an hour to the trip, rather’n 5 minutes. A little extreme even for here.
Don’t give them ideas.
A few miles from here our tax dollars are mutating a rotary (read as accident magnet) into a roundabout. Skipping over the minor fact that no one knows how to drive in a rotary, causing miles long backups, this new thing will confront the local drivers in new and strange ways.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’d be pissed, too. I’d reply with a terse letter to the son, asking WHY his dad needs all that information, and WHERE it’s going to be “recorded”.
I wonder if one of the answers is “The Temple”… Mormons are the best at genealogy, because they dig and dig. And (at least in the past), have been known to “re-baptize” ancestors as Mormons. A friend of mine (devout Jew) had that happen to his family, and he was livid. I don’t know if they still do that…
But it’s a little creepy that no one has given you a reason for all this research.
Set up a webcam and start your own YouTube channel. Maybe pick up some ad revenue.
If you hit the jackpot, just remember that I like single malt Irish whiskeys from the Speyside region.
I agree with this. But they did ask for you to correct the information so you might “correct” it to have the phone numbers one digit off, or removed altogether, and so forth.
Well the podiatrist put me in a boot. It seems I have 3 broken metatarsals and 2 broken toes and no telling what torn ligaments. 4 weeks wearing this lovely thing. It’s uncomfortable and the Cats are thoroughly freaked out. They don’t like new things coming in their domain.Bad.Me. I shouldn’t have an injury, it disturbs their delicate sensibilities. 
Is Ancestry.com associated with the Mormons? If so, their default is not to list detailed information (including names) from family trees to the public for anyone who is not yet deceased. Information that they’ve purchased from other sources is available, though, including from town directories, which supply a lot of address information.
That kind of information is good for confirming which John Smith is being listing in someone else’s family tree. (But don’t trust other trees. I found an entry on another (free) site that had lumped three different D. Johnsons together. Look for direct information, like marriage certificates or census forms.)
It sounds like Uncle may be used to collecting information from Ancestry or another genealogy aggregator, and just be used to getting the address information, because that’s what those sites have. Sadly, if he got it online, it’s already public.
I buy a nice Papa Murphy’s pizza - Cowboy with extra cheese instead of pepperoni - with the expectation of having dinner and lunch for three days. Have a slice, let it cool, wrap it up in foil… and somehow get distracted, because when I woke up this morning, it was all sitting out on my counter still. During the summer.
Money wasted on pizza. Money wasted on changed lunch plans. I hate wasting money.
Aw, man. Bummer. I hate for you.
I’m eating leftover sushi for lunch today. Leftover sushi; there shouldn’t be such a thing.
I’ve been making nice dinners on Mondays, trying to extend the weekend just a bit. I worked in the kitchen from 3-7, and I made too much sushi for two hungry adults to eat. Damn. Plus, I made Thai sticky rice with mangoes for dessert. Damn.
I don’t have any idea whether he can legally collect and publish the information, but by asking you to vet it, he just handed you an almost unmissable opportunity to fuck with his project.
He wants corrections? Give him corrections up the ass. Subtly change the spelling of each name (e.g., Jim becomes “Jhim,” Carol Ann is now “Karol Aunn,” that kind of thing). Transpose key pieces of data, so nothing is accurate.
Let’s say you have:
Bradley Morgan 123 Elm Ave. Jefferson City, MO 573 112-4545
Mark Cooper 201 N. Spring St. Laguna Beach, CA 949 089-7675
Susan Schaefer 1469 Lorimar Cir. San Jose, CA 450 555-2468
Well, send him back:
Bradley Morgan 123 N. Spring St. San Jose, CA 450 112-7675
Mark Cooper 201 Lorimar Cir. Jefferson City, MO 573 555-4545
Susan Schaefer 1469 Elm Ave. Laguna Beach, CA 949 089-2468
And a month later, send him another “corrected” copy, “apologizing” for the errors.
Customer’s credit card gets denied. She cusses out me and the store. Very loudly.
What the hell did I have to do with it?
Well clearly, you decided to embarrass her by pushing the “do not accept this credit card” button you definitely have and that everyone knows exist. She definitely didn’t add to her own embarrassment by cussing you out.
Retail is just the greatest industry to work in, isn’t it?
I am tired and my brain has decided it doesn’t want to do work today. I took yesterday off in hopes of feeling more rested but I think it’s just that work is exhausting, even when I’m only 2 hours in. So, I guess I’m gonna just try to do as much work as I can today while wading through all this foggy feeling nonsense.
Well, I’ve spoken with the lawyer, and it sounds like there really isn’t very much I can do. 
The information involved isn’t considered secret (or ‘proprietary’) because it’s all part of openly accessible public records already.
And it appears to be true. At least, about me and my husband, and the rest of it all seems to fit with what I know about the relatives, though I’d never swear to dates or exact spellings or such.
And it’s not slanderous or ‘tending to bring shame’ or whatever. I guess the most “scandalous” thing included is that a particular person has been married four times and she’s only 25. And it doesn’t include the fact that another person served a short prison term, though if that’s out of discretion or ignorance, well, I can’t know or ask.
The lawyer suggested that he just send them an “official legal” letter, pointing out that I have no right or ability to verify information or grant permission for the use of the information about any of the other people included in ‘this side’ of the family. That each such person, or their legal guardian in the case of minors, should be contacted individually for such verification and permission. Hopefully the extra work would put the son off.
Also some stuff about how if at any point information from this compendium was used to harm or harass any of these people, he and his father could be faced with possible legal consequences.
(Yeah, not likely, but maybe it’ll give him/them pause.)
I do like the idea of screwing around with the data, but I suspect if I did that, it would put me in the category of being ‘actively involved’ in this whole project, and I absolutely don’t want that.
Hmm. Maybe I could ask that he at least delete our unlisted phone number? That isn’t already open to the public.
I’d have the lawyer mention that. Strongly.
Or send your info back with that crossed out as a “correction”.
ETA: Did the son ever address WHY all this information is being compiled? Did you ever ask him? And where it’s being “recorded”?
This letter was the first I’d ever heard from the son, and no reply has gone to him yet. The father had mentioned the LDS church occasionally in his older letters, so I’ve always assumed (yeah, I know) that his genealogy project was something to do with them. Aren’t they big on that sort of thing? I think I’ve heard they have big archives that they let people use in researching their own families.
As I said at the start, I just don’t ‘get’ why people care about this stuff at all, unless you think you are due some inheritance or are tracking a disease or something like that.
Even if you want to make some vague claim to greatness because your third great-grandfather invented something or was a Prime Minister or whatever … only 1/32nd of your genes came from him, so what does that matter? Does anyone really think one whit more or less of you if you told them about it?
In this case it makes even less sense. The man who started this research is my mother’s first cousin! Family trees trace upwards to your ancestors and downward through your children. Sidelines through siblings of ancestors don’t even show up, unless you’re European royalty and have all been intermarrying for generations.
I googled the LDS and genealogy and a Huffpost blog (Why Mormons do Genealogy? | HuffPost Religion) was one of the top hits. One quote:
Better cross off popcorn at the Cinema–they use 5 gallon cans of Palm oil to pop the stuff–it’s solid at room temp, so it has to be melted to get the pump in. FUN!(not)