Living individuals in sources: To name or not to name?

Question

Hi there. Hope you're all well.

I have a family tree given to me by a distant cousin that supposedly connects us through his great-grandfather. I would like to import at least enough of his tree to form that connection.

I am well aware that, ordinarily, WikiTree prefers primary sources for research. My problem is, if I think I'm going to be using a rainy day for my side of the research, I have a bad feeling I'm going to be simply playing with lions trying to redo research on his immediate family, who have a relatively common surname.

Thankfully, I'm guessing since my relative presumably knows the details for his immediate family, there shouldn't be a real problem using his family tree as a source, at least temporarily until someone who has more patience or insight can replace them with primary sources.

Unfortunately I am no longer in contact with him so have no immediate way of inviting him on here.

In that case, assuming he is still alive, how do I cite the "Who", without giving his name, given how WikiTree protects information for living individuals? Is there some template or macro that I can use that allows WikiTree to view his privacy settings and determine what name to use for him based on that? Or should I just link to the profile and leave the link text as the wiki ID?

Cheers.

Answer 1

Cite it as "unsourced family tree obtained from X-1234" (where "X-1234 is the Wikitree ID of the profile you've created for your cousin), pending the addition of better sources. Even with a relatively common surname, it's usually fairly trivial to narrow it down to the right family if you have at least a spouse's surname and a location; the FreeBMD index would likely be a good source there. 

Comments

I guess that's true. For some reason I had it in my head that I would have to completely redo his research. I never thought of using his tree as a sort of reference tool.

As for being unsourced. I'm sure the original data he sent me did contain sources, but they didn't import for whatever reason. Maybe I didn't import those because my screen reader couldn't access that section very well in the software I was using.

Thanks for your answer though. that helps a lot.

Cheers.

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C. Handy,

Your answer implies that we need to create profiles for every living author of a source we cite, then change all citations to the format you recommend above.  Does this mean that all the Puritan Great Migration profiles need to be changed to no longer cite Robert Charles Anderson (author of the Great Migration series), but Anderson-123456 ?

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Jillaine,

I interpret it as follows.

For a published work, that would likely also publish the author's name, that would be safe to simply use the name as printed. I assume that's the umbrella the Great Migration series would fall under.

On the other hand, for a case of private email correspondence which is not in the public domain, we would either need to create a profile for the original researcher, or find some other way of citing that data while keeping their names private (assuming they are still alive). Since the tree I'm working on was sent by a distant cousin, naturally I have created a profile for him anyway so I can link him into my tree.

Interestingly, I've been battling this out for a while, because most of my older data comes from when I didn't know how to research myself and commissioned a genealogist to do it for me. Do I put his name, or not? Part of me says yes, credit where credit is due and so on, but another part of me felt uneasy given the software and help guides emphasise the importance of maintaining privacy for living individuals (hence the reason we need to be added to trusted lists to see info etc).

Cheers.