.jpg?width=900&height=525&name=Ash%20TR%20Blog%20Pictures%20(25).jpg)
People are becoming increasingly protective over their personal data, and in our work, we often encounter people who are surprised and shocked to discover that personal documents such as their own birth and marriage certificates are available for almost anyone to obtain a copy of.
There has been a significant increase in interest in genealogy as a hobby, partly due to successful television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are, combined with the easier availability of genealogical data with the advent of websites such as Ancestry and Find My Past. This has raised awareness of genealogy to many more members of the public. In fact, it was a colleague at Find My Past who alerted us to the fact that members of the public are entitled, under the Data Protection Act, to instruct websites such as Find My Past to remove their records from the public domain.
In practice, what this means is that the website has to delete their birth entry, and/or marriage entry, from the General Registry Office (GRO) England and Wales indexes. It is the entry which is removed, and the original image – which is also stored by the website and made available to view – remains unaffected and unredacted, and the relevant certificate can still be ordered from the GRO. Therefore, details of the individual in question could still be viewed incidentally by a researcher looking at a different record on the same page and could be found by a researcher who is searching the indices page by page, for events up to the end of 1983. Events which occur from January 1984 onwards are computerised and therefore once removed from the website, the record is not available to view by a researcher.
This highlights the importance of employing an experienced genealogist to research family trees for inheritance purposes. The genealogist should not be relying on transcribed databases alone but should be examining the original index pages where available. In addition, once all potential heirs are identified, the genealogist should as a matter of course be recommending Missing Beneficiary Indemnity Insurance to protect Personal Representatives against claims that may arise from unknown potential heirs, as well as those whose existence may not be discoverable through genealogical sources.
Topics: Genealogical research, Ethical approach, Protection
