New Brunswick Obituaries

Question

Hi!

I have been involved in genealogy for about 25 years. I currently maintain the "Campobello New Brunswick Genealogy Page" on Facebook, have for about 12 years and have over 1200 members. I have several hundred obituaries on there that I have saved from Newspapers .com among other sites. I would like to back up the obits here on a free space page. Is this possible?? Thanks.

Answer 1

As long as nobody's copyright is being violated, you can create a free space page on any topic and put anything on it (within reason, of course!) Select Add > New Free-Space from the menu at the top of WikiTree pages.

Answer 2

In Canada all obituaries are considered owned by whoever their creator is. So if you are looking at Canadian obituaries- you may want to think twice about reposting them publicly. I know in 2019, a company was successfully sued for reposting obituaries online, because they broke copyright. I’m fairly certain that obits are considered under copyright until 70 years after the death of its author. So unless you know who actually wrote the obit, you’d have to wait a fairly long time to legally post it.  I would definitely do your research on copyright before mass posting them, that’s for sure.

I know I personally manage thousands of Find a Grave memorials and when people upload an obit to any of them, I have Find a Grave remove them due to copyright, and they agree with me every time.