Legislation and genealogy: communication deadlines

Overview of genealogy laws

You have surely already experienced it, and you may have sometimes worked with it, but like any activity related to privacy and personal information, genealogy is affected by strict legislation. 

Overview 

This affects several aspects of genealogy.

First, the communication time for archives: they are communicable after 75 years for civilian states, legal files or even regulations and 120 years for medical information from the date of birth if the date of death is not known, 50 if it is. However, beware of the more recent marginal mentions appearing on acts that have become communicable and which would be likely to infringe the privacy of the persons concerned. The CNIL has decided that these mentions should not appear online within 100 years after the closing of the birth certificate register.

For everything related to living people, the manager of a website dealing with data on these people is subject to the law which provides that any data made up of information to identify a natural person is subject to the consent of this. 

Thanks to the Data Protection Act of January 6, 1978, these people whose data is processed can oppose it, especially when their name appears on an online family tree. 

In addition, data related to ethnic origins, political or religious opinions or even sexual orientation cannot be reused. 

For deceased persons, information relating to it is no longer considered personal and can therefore be used if it is not likely to harm the heirs.

Genealogy and technology: when innovation brings new debates

La généalogie n’a pas été oubliée par les avancées technologiques et a su s’y adapter et même les utiliser en tant qu’outil, c’est ainsi que le séquençage ADN peut permettre de connaître le groupe préhistorique de ses ancêtres, le peuple d’origine dans l’Antiquité de ceux-ci ou encore la région où l’on retrouve le plus son profil génétique. En France, les tests ADN ne sont autorisés que dans trois cas : les décisions de justice, à des fins médicales ou dans le cadre de recherches scientifiques.

Recently there have also been many debates on what some call the "looting" of family trees. To summarize, this concerns people who copy the information of trees stored on databases. However, the genealogical data is not subject to copyright, in fact it is public information and unless you have its own software, the bases do not belong to genealogists. In addition, was not genealogy based on sharing? This is a debate that has not finished lifting passions.