For Data Protection reasons genealogical information passed into the Community portal or to the Society about living or potentially living individuals should only be in the form of information taken from extracts from UK national birth or marriage indexes, and such information should always include a clear GRO index reference. Normally, in relation to potentially living individuals, we restrict ourselves to holding only index information in our Society databases. If you are contributing from overseas you may wish to look at the Data Protection rules for your country although they are generally similar for Western democracies. For family history purposes it is normally easy to avoid reference to living individuals, for example, by simply referring to the most recently deceased person in your tree and saying 'this is my...'. In the absence of information that an individual has died a probable date of birth at least 100 years ago or a marriage 83 years ago is considered safe. In the UK, if you restrict yourself to publicly available information this also avoids the need for you to obtain consent from the live individual in question. One way of thinking about it is to ask yourself, 'Am I making available information that might make identity theft easier?'

Information about deceased individuals can be sensitive so that in passing over data you should be aware that it will be stored in our databases and available to others. We think this is rarely a problem as many sensitive facts like suicide or entry into a mental institution are publicly available anyway and become less sensitive with each passing generation. However, individuals vary considerably in their sensitivity to such things and you should take this into account. From our point of view, information which helps identify family lines and branches is the most important for us to have, although family stories add to the historical value.