Privacy and ethics when researching living people

Research into the past keeps running into the present. A family tree reaches your cousins. An obituary from 1998 lists grandchildren by name and town. A DNA match turns out to be a half-sibling nobody mentioned. A local history of a factory town includes the plant's last layoffs, and the people laid off still live there.

None of this means you should stop. It means the closer your research gets to living people, the more your choices affect someone who didn't ask to be researched. This guide covers practical habits that keep family and local history from turning into exposure.

Why the past is easier

Archives draw lines on purpose. The census is closed for 72 years. Military personnel files become fully public 62 years after a service member leaves. Many states keep birth records closed for a century or more and death records for decades. Courts seal juvenile records. The pattern is the same everywhere: records about people become public history once those people, and usually their children, are no longer affected by them.

When you work on people born within the last century, you're working on the near side of those lines. A good rule is to follow the spirit of the archives' restrictions even where the information is technically available somewhere else.

Sharing family trees

Most online family tree services hide living people from public view by default, showing them as "Living" or "Private." Keep it that way. A shared tree can expose names, birth dates and mothers' maiden names, which are the details used to verify identity at banks and to steal it.

Some habits worth adopting:

• Treat anyone born within the last 100 years as living unless you have a death record.
• Don't publish birth dates, addresses or contact details of living people, even close family.
• Ask before publishing photos of living relatives, including children.
• Watch your sources. An attached obituary or newspaper clipping can reveal more about the living than the tree itself.
• If someone asks you to remove information about themselves, do it.

DNA tests and family secrets

Consumer DNA testing has made it common to discover unknown half-siblings, adoptions, donor conception and misattributed parentage. These discoveries affect more people than the tester.

If your results reveal something unexpected:

• Slow down. Confirm the relationship with more matches and documents before acting.
• Think about who will be affected, including people who never tested and didn't consent to having their relationships revealed.
• If you contact a new match, be brief, kind and patient. Give them room to say no or to take months to reply.
• Don't publish or share another person's match information without permission.
• Adoptees and donor-conceived people have their own strong interest in knowing their origins. Support organizations and adoptee-run groups can help with search and first contact.

Before testing, read the company's terms on data sharing and law enforcement access, and remember that a DNA sample also says something about your relatives.

Sensitive records

Some historical records carry stigma that can still hurt descendants: institutionalization, illegitimacy, adoption, criminal convictions, disease, suicide and poverty. Family history is often richer and more honest for including these things. A great-grandmother's years in a state hospital or a great-uncle's prison term are part of the family's story.

The questions change when the people are recently dead or still alive. Consider:

• Is the person living, or are their children and siblings living?
• Would the detail affect someone's job, housing or relationships if it spread?
• Does the story need the detail, or only the broad outline?
• Was the record created in confidence, such as medical or adoption files?

Many family historians share full detail within the family and a gentler version in public. That's a reasonable compromise.

Criminal records and old arrests

Arrest reports and court cases appear constantly in old newspapers and court files. For ancestors from a century ago, they're history. For people still living, they're something else: a single arrest, sometimes never prosecuted, can follow someone for decades when it's repeated online.

If your research turns up a recent arrest or conviction of a living person, don't publish it as part of a family or local history. If you're the person affected, our guide on removing old mugshots and arrest records from people-search sites explains the options.

Research versus surveillance

Some activity looks like genealogy but isn't. Using public records to find the current address of someone who doesn't want to be found, to check up on an ex-partner, or to build a profile of a neighbor crosses from research into surveillance, and in some cases into harassment or stalking, which are crimes.

People-search websites blur this line. They compile public records, data broker files and social media into reports on living people, and some once posted mugshots and arrest records next to names. OpenPasts doesn't do this, and we don't recommend using such sites for family history. They're unreliable as sources and harmful to the people listed.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Am I studying the past, or tracking someone's present?
• Would this person reasonably expect me to have this information?
• If they knew I was looking, would they object?

If the honest answer to the last question is yes, stop.

Local history about recent decades

Writing about a town's recent past, such as a closed school, a strike, or a disaster, means writing about people who still live there. Oral histories with consent forms, careful attribution, and letting interviewees review quotes are standard practice in oral history for good reason. When you write about events within living memory, focus on what happened and why, and be sparing with names of private individuals who weren't public figures.

Keep your own records secure

Your research notes contain personal information about many people. Store them carefully, password-protect cloud accounts, and don't post raw notes publicly. The research log on our homepage keeps data only in your own browser for that reason; export it to keep a backup.

Ethical research doesn't mean timid research. It means telling the truth about the past while treating living people the way you'd want a stranger researching your own family to treat you.