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Whitmore Surname Project
Copyright Considerations for our pages
Most of the information on our web pages is simply a collection of facts, and facts or data are not protected by copyright—no matter how much cost in terms of time and money may have been expended to collect them. Anyone is free to copy and use the data we report as DNA results, and most of the information we, or you, report in our pedigree files—birth, death and marriage dates and places, relationships, etc. Copyright law is designed to protect creative work and the search for and reporting of data and facts, interesting as it may be to a genealogist, is not considered to be creative. (Diana Gale Matthiesen has written an excellent essay on this topic from a layperson's viewpoint. If you are interested in pursuing this further, we suggest that you visit and read "A Word on Copyright for Genealgists," at Diana's Genealogy Home Page.)
When it comes to the facts reported in our pedigree files, using our pages as source data would be, plainly speaking, poor scholarship. If you are a serious genealogist you will want to check the information we provide from something as close to a primary source as you can find. If we report, say, Middletown Town Records as a source for a birthdate, you should review those records to verify our reporting. If, for some reason, you find it impossible to check that source for yourself, you should not state our source as your source. You might then cite this web page (some suggested citations will be presented at the end of this little "essay") noting that we cite Middletown Town Records.
The haplotype and haplogroup data we report here will probably be as close to a primary record as you will be able to find, and if you make use of this information you should cite these web pages as your source. Our conclusions and analysis are subject to copyright. You are welcome to quote freely from this type of material or to link to it, properly citing your source. Although not doing so would not put you in violation of copyright (and quite frankly we would be most unlikely to proscute you if it were), but it would be plagerism, a rather nasty thing in academic circles.
Our compilation in its totality is subject to copyright. The indexing, copying and caching of web pages is farily common today. We welcome this as it makes it possible for people to locate the information we publish, and, if cached in something like the "WayBack Machine", to preserve material that may otherwise disappear. You are welcome to link to our page, but not to cache it for use as an alternative to our web site, especially on a commercial site.
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