I send my deepest sympathy to Pat Richley, better known as DearMYRTLE, whose father, Glen Shirl Player, M.D., passed away this morning after an extended illness. I had spoken to her on Monday and she had referred to her father in a loving way–but I did not know then that he was ill. He was 89 years old. His wife, Blanche, passed away last December.
Pat has given so much to the genealogical community over the years—I wish her and her family the peace they need at this most difficult time.
HARP, the Historical Appellate Review Project, has had a great launch. We are already pursuing several cases and have had inquiries about several more. These may take months to resolve, but we’ll tell the stories here!
A HARP Case
One of the HARP cases I’m pursuing for my own family is that of my great-grandmother, Bettie Sanford Manson. She was born in 1872, one of four daughters of Billie Sanford and Emely Scott. She married Otis Manson in Rockdale, Texas, in August of 1890.
My father says he only saw his grandmother once–that was in 1948 in Midland, Texas, where she and Otis had moved their family in 1947 for reasons still not clear to me. He says that he saw her from a distance–she was standing out in the middle of a field. The family would not let him get any closer, explaining to him that she was mentally ill.
In an index of Milam County records, I found two cases in the 1930′s concerning a conservatorship for Bettie Manson. When I tried to get the records, I was told that they were sealed and I would need a court order to unseal them.
I would like to know the reasons for the conservatorship and especially who applied for it. Otis Manson was an illiterate man; did someone persuade him that his wife was mentally ill? What was the evidence that she was mentally ill?
In this case, HARP will be going to court in Texas to move to have the records unsealed. Bettie Manson, her husband, and all of their children are deceased. Only three of her grandchildren remain alive; my father is one of them. As far as I know, none of her great-grandchildren recall her. She died in 1955 and her oldest great-grandchild was born in 1951. So there should be little reason to keep these records sealed.
This case will be interesting for its procedure as well as its outcome. It will be instructive as to how HARP goes to court. Stay tuned!
My great-great-grandmother, Matilda Manson, had a sister, Mary, born in about 1846. [See 1850 US Census, Talbot County, Georgia]. The 1850 census is the only one in which Matilda, Mary, and their mother, Jane, appear together in the same household. In fact, it may be the only census in which Mary appears at all.
Mary next appears in a record in 1853. In that year, she was the donee of a parcel of land conveyed “with love and affection” by one Nathaniel Brown, a 60 year old white man in Taylor County, Georgia. Thereafter, Mary Manson disappears from recorded history. What happened to her?
She may have gotten married; she may have died; she may have left the state. But this is a tremendous challenge. I really want to know what happened to Mary Manson. I’m checking tax records and land records. Georgia vital records are sparse in this period.
Now there is a Mary Manson living on the large plantation at Turkey Creek in Wilkinson County. I doubt that this is the same person. Those at Turkey Creek were all slaves–Mary was a free woman of color.
So this is Mystery #1: what became of Mary Manson? I hope I can solve it!
Historical Appellate Review Project to Launch
A few months ago, I told the story of being inspired to a new project through a dream about one of my ancestors. I said the new project would launch in a few months. Now is the time. Here’s the story:
The ancestor I was dreaming about was my great-great-grandfather, Guy Bryant. He was born in DeWitt County, Texas, in October 1860. He was the oldest son of Alfred and Harriet Bryant, who had come from Tennessee and North Carolina respectively. The Bryants eventually found their way to the Texas Gulf Coast, settling in Nueces County. Corpus Christi is the seat of Nueces County.
On December 2, 1876, sixteen year old Guy was arrested in Corpus Christi and charged with “hauling & removing shell from front of lots on the beach.” He was arraigned that same day in the City Recorders Court. Guy entered a plea of guilty and was fined five dollars. See a transcript of the court records here. He didn’t have five dollars and therefore ended up spending several days in jail. I believe a relative eventually paid the fine.
A few years ago I was invited to Corpus Christi for the dedication of a new edifice on the waterfront. I couldn’t go, but one of my associates went in my stead. He knew Guy Bryant’s story and told it to the then-Mayor. The Mayor said, “Well, we’ll have to see about a pardon!” Everyone assembled chuckled. The Mayor didn’t grant Guy a pardon, but sent me a lovely coffee table book about Corpus Christi.
One night, I dreamed about Guy Bryant. And in the midst of the dream, I thought (or maybe Guy thought), “A pardon? Well, why not?!” In that moment, the Historical Appellate Review Project (HARP) was born.
It works like this: Using state-of-the-art genealogical and legal research techniques, HARP will investigate cases of allegedly ne’er-do-well ancestors and render an opinion as to whether they were likely guilty or not, whether they got a fair trial, and whether they might be eligible for a pardon. In certain select cases, HARP might actually go to court to clear the name of a wrongly accused or wrongly convicted ancestor.
The purposes are to educate and inform the present generation about the truth of their forebears. Often, it won’t be pretty. Sometimes, it’ll be historically miraculous! HARP might actually succeed in setting the record straight.
There are some conditions. First, the case must be at least seventy-five years old. That is, seventy-five years must have passed since the last court order in the matter. Second, the accused must be deceased. Anyone, not just relatives, may submit a case to HARP. And, yes, there will be a fee–a reasonable one. HARP reserves the right to change the conditions at any time. Complete details are available by e-mailing HARP.
I’m quite excited about this project. It should be fun! Stories about the cases will appear here at GeneaBlogie. Of course, the first case is in progress–that of Guy Bryant himself!
The HARP Website is here; still under construction, but we’re ready to go.
And, by the way, all the usual features that you like about GeneaBlogie will still be here, too!
Let me know what you think.
UPDATE (9/20/07–7:31 AM PDT): Link to HARP Website corrected.
Today is the 60th Anniversary of the United States Air Force!
He had gotten out the wicker-straw suitcase and had it open on the bed. In it, he had already placed the Brownie camera his grandmother had given him as a birthday present some time ago. Now he was looking through the closet for the most important stuff.
The invitation said he needed a soldier’s uniform this time. And he had a lot of soldier’s uniforms–some from the present, some from the past (whatever that meant) and some from the apparent future. That was a bit of a problem–which one could he take this time that he had not taken before? And which of those might be very eye-catching?
Through the metal blinds he could see that the sun was getting lower in the sky. Why did he always wait until the last minute to pack?
The soldier’s uniform he picked had an Army Air Forces patch on the shoulder of the jacket. He laid it carefully in the suitcase. There was a hat, an officer’s hat with the eagle on it. And the hat had that “25 mission” crush in its middle. He put it in the suitcase on top of the jacket. There were brown shoes, too, which he placed under the jacket.
On the bedside table, there was a copy of the Stars and Stripes of London–the U.S. forces newspaper–dated February 5, 1944. He hadn’t read it all, but he’d read the important news about the mission launched from East Anglia two days earlier. There was also a copy of the Vidette-Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana, dated Thursday, January 31, 1946. He hadn’t finished reading it either. But he’d get caught up on the trip.
He closed the suitcase, put on his coat and his hat, and rushed out of the flat and down the stairs. He hurried along the street and made it the short block to the bus station just as the clock struck the hour and a big green and white bus pulled out. It turned the corner and disappeared down the hill.
“Oh, beans and rice!” he exclaimed, “I’ve missed the bus!” The clerk behind the counter said, “No need to worry, pal. There’s another bus to Chicago in about two hours.”
He sighed and dropped the suitcase to the floor. He sat down on top of the suitcase and put his head between his hands.
“I wasn’t going to Chicago,” he said, “I was going to the Carnival.”
Many are familiar with the National Register of Historic Places. A good resource for research is the set of nomination forms for places on the Register. These are available from the National Park Service at the address on this page.
The Park Service hopes eventually to have all of the nomination forms online. But until then, a e-mail to the Park Service will get you the materials. They responded to my e-mail within a day or two and sent me materials in less than three weeks. I was not charged for the material.
So what does one get? Well, I sent for the nomination package for Buena Vista, the plantation in De Soto Parish, Louisiana, where my Brayboy, LeJay, and probably Gines, ancestors were held in bondage by the Boykin Witherspoon family. The nomination papers included a written statement of significance prepared by the nominator. This statement described the property and included an historical note that contained a transcription of the1859 contract to build the estate. There were also three pages of photographs and two pages of diagrams.
Information similar to this can be found in the nomination papers of any of the properties on the National Register. If your family had any connection to a National Register property, these papers may add to your understanding of the family.
After what I call “the late controversy,” I’m gradually getting back to genealogy. But given the reaction to the recent series, I’ve decided that every now and then, GeneaBlogie will feature copyright and other legal matters that I hope will benefit the community. I ‘m thinking we’ll even have some interviews with leading experts in the field. The idea is to keep us up to date on developments that affect us as Web publishers. How about it?
I’ve been a Footnote.com subscriber for awhile now, but hadn’t really spent a lot of time with it until recently. When I first started with it, it seemed to have a lot of fairly obscure documents, such as the city council minutes of South Boston, Virginia. Frankly, what brought me back to explore it again was a series of interesting posts by Miriam Midkiff at Ancestories in which the stories she told were tied to documents on Footnote.com.
Now I’m quite a bit more impressed. Partnerships with the National Archives and FamilySearch have brought a number of interesting documents and photographs to Footnote.com. The American Milestone Documents collection, for example, is just what the name suggests: important documents in American history. And there are a number of military records.
I like the fact that for each finite set of documents, Footnote indicates what percentage of the set is currently available.
More purely genealogical documents are available now. In the 16% complete Texas Death Certificates collection, I found two death certificates that I’d been unable to find elsewhere for several years. One of these I had thought did not exist.
Navigation could use some improvement, but otherwise, the technical aspects of the site are in the “superior” category.
I’m visiting Footnote.com often just to browse the interesting documents.
Recommendation: A “must visit.”
I think an analysis of the statutory “fair use” factors can lead to the conclusion that Ancestry.com’s “Internet Biographical Collection” as it was initially set up, did not constitute a fair use of the copyrighted material collected and used.
I think that Ancestry’s IBC probably does not qualify for the system caching “safe harbor” for infringement in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Some of Ancestry’s statements about the IBC suggest a certain permanence, not the “intermediate and temporary” caching that the law protects.
I think that issues of “fair use” and DMCA “safe harbor” as they relate to search engine caching have not yet had a full examination by the courts. I think that reliance on the few decided cases leaves a great deal of uncertainty, no matter how much the industry puts an optimistic face on it. I think that the United States Supreme Court will eventually decide these issues. The law yet may turn out to be as the industry wants it, but that’s not where we are today.
The few decided cases on this matter seem to suggest that the copyright holder must take steps to keep the protected content from being collected by the various bots that roam the Internet. In Field v. Google, for example, the court held that Field’s failure to utilize a “no-archive” meta-tag was the basis on which the court could find that Field had given Google an “implied license” to use his copyrighted content. This holding either turns the law on its head or shows how different copyright law is from other law or is an example of judicial value imposition.
Here’s what I mean by the last sentence above. To say that a web publisher gives an implied licence to anyone who wants to take protected content if the publisher fails to use certain meta-tags or other technical means is akin to saying that one gives an implied license to a burglar if one’s door isn’t locked. That turns the law on its head. Or perhaps that’s just how different copyright law is.
Actually, I think it’s the third thing: judicially imposed values. By this I mean that judges have decided that there are salutary purposes served by the practices of companies like Google and that to enjoin them would constrain the economic growth of the Internet. This can be seen by the recitation by the courts of the “socially important purposes” served by Google, for example. [See Field v. Google, Inc., 412 FSupp2d 1106, 1119 (D.Nev. 2006)] In the nineteenth century, courts took a doctrinally similar approach to the development of law concerning railroads. Philosophically, I may agree with the notion that the law shouldn’t hinder the development of the Internet, but some of the questions about how the law operates with respect to the Internet, are for the Congress, and not judges to decide. That’s especially so when it appears that the judges got the intent of Congress wrong in the first place. [See the discussion of the DCMA in the post yesterday.]
===>So did Ancestry’s IBC violate copyright law? Well, lawyers are infamously cautious . . . . If I were advising Ancestry [which I am not] and sticking to a careful reading of the law, I would tell them to take the IBC back the drawing board, because I would not be comfortable with the infringement risk that they took. It looks to me like they collected and archived and made avail to third parties content owned by other publishers. I would tell them not to rely on the Field case, the Parker case, or the Kelly case. I might tell Google the same thing were I advising them [which I'm not]. Lindsay said in the comments the other day:
Google is very analogous to an ISP in that it is not in the content business. Ancestry on the other hand is taking content for the purpose of publishing it on their own site. One is a side effect of providing search services and has other uses, the other is appropriation for the purpose of publishing.
As to Google’s search engine, I think this is true.
====>Must content owners utilize meta-tags and “robot.txt” files to avoid giving an implied licence? [What follows is opinion, not legal advice] I know that an unlocked door is no defense to a burglar, but I still lock my doors. The problem is that the burden of using these technical tools is, in many cases, fairly minimal, whereas the courts believe the burden on the service provider like Google to communicate with each publisher is substantial, if not insurmountable. Now some content owners do not necessarily have access to the page source to insert such code,; they may have to ask their web-hosting services to help them out. If they won’t, get another host. Now I happen to believe that the Supreme Court may modify this emerging rule to some extent, but until they do, perhaps “safe rather than sorry” is a good idea.
====>Does Ancestry’s Terms and Conditions of Use protect it in this matter? I think not.
====>What is the significance of “notice” of the MyFamilyBot? At some point, Ancestry.com added the following page to its site:
The MyFamilyBot Information Page:
What is MyFamilyBot? Why is it accessing my files?:
MyFamily is creating an index based on a powerful person-based biographical ranking engine that gives superior results over searches done using the more general purpose internet search engines. Ancestry.com indexes the biographic text and provides a search service that points users back to the originating website.
MyFamilyBot is the name of a web crawler (a.k.a. robot, spider) used by MyFamily.com to find biographical text on the Internet in connection with this engine. The crawler works by deeply crawling sites that contain biographical text. We have constructed the bot to limit its affect on site usage to be within the range of that of the large commercial search engines. Sites that do not contain biographical text are examined in a superficial manner.
How do I prevent MyFamilyBot from crawling my site?
MyFamilyBot supports the Internet standard protocols for restricting spiders from crawling web sites. These protocols are described here:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html
How can I contact someone concerning MyFamilyBot?
Please send questions and concerns about MyFamilyBot to SearchBot@MyFamilyInc.com.
I have no idea when this page was added and I’m still not sure how to access it on the Ancestry.com site. (Ironically, I used Google’s cache to find it). Some may believe that this page constitutes some sort of notice to Web publishers who thereupon should have put into place the well-known protocols for preventing “MyFamilyBot” from crawling their site. I don’t agree with this for a variety of reasons. First, I’m concerned about the adequacy of the notice. Second, the reasons I gave above apply here. This would continue to turn property law upside down.
CONCLUSION: Ancestry did the right thing by removing the IBC. They were in a fog of legal uncertainty. And more importantly, the rather surreptitious manner in which they established the IBC breached faith with their membership and the rest of the genealogical community. The legal issues ultimately will be resolved the by the United States supreme Court. The ethical and social issues can only be worked out if Ancestry reaches out to the community and engages the community in a genuine effort to close the breach. They’ve got some work to do on that issue. Now’s the time to start.
Notice: The information in this writing is intended for educational use only and is not intended nor should it be construed as legal advice. If you have a legal problem, consult a lawyer admitted to practice in your state of residence. I am an active member of the bar of the State of California and am admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court and various other federal courts. I am not licensed to practice in any other state. I am not presently soliciting or accepting new clients in the matters discussed above.
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