This session will discuss what ethics and morality mean, and what these have to do with genealogy and family history. We’re just compiling our family tree, what possible problems could there be? Have any of you asked any family members if it’s ok to include them on your tree? Researching and devising a family tree traditionally involved asking relatives about their lives and undertaking a paper trail. However, it now involves finding previously inaccessible records and dealing with others via the internet, who are strangers that you will probably never meet. Ethical dilemmas in genealogy have come to the forefront since law enforcement utilised information from GEDMatch to apprehend a suspected serial killer. However, ethical dilemmas include discovering secrets, lies, bigamy, enslavement, criminals, unexpected DNA relatives, upsetting findings, relatives that aren’t now related, unexpected ethnicities, injustices; and the ‘netiquette’ involved with approaching online matches.

You can put your tree on websites, strangers can look at it, glean information and add your photos. We all think that we’re a nice person, but we are searching into people’s private lives, and although it seems fine for us to do this to deceased ancestors, we may well be offended by those methods of searching being used on us now, or in the future. Is it OK to look for DNA matches on Facebook or LinkedIn?

As a new discipline, people can now study accredited courses and join professional bodies which have regulations, Codes of Conduct, responsibilities, accountability and require CPD, but without individual ethical awareness can genealogy keep up? Attendees will benefit from considering ethical issues with more empathy and sensitivity.