1. Do you, or are you, going to charge for access to the information on the site? If I submit information or certificates to the site will you then charge others for accessing them?

No, I have no intention of charging anyone for access to anything on easterbrook.org.uk. The site is free and will remain so.
However, there are some areas where information is restricted due to factors not under my control:

Information about living individuals is either not displayed at all or is obscured (usually by only using an initial) on the public website to protect the confidentialiy and privacy of those individuals and to abide by the UK Data Protection Act 1998 and the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communcations Regulations 2003. This information is available on request to genuine researchers who can show a relationship.
Documents or other sources that may be subject to copyright or have been obtained via a chargable service are not shown on the website unless requested. Sharing or copying a few pages to assist in research is usually considered fair use, re-publishing everything is almost certainly not permissible.
Commercial use of the information is strictly forbidden. I reserve the right to charge for unauthorised commercial use. This charge will be greater than the commercial value of the information.

2. How do you protect the privacy and confidentiality of the families you are researching?

By following the principles in the UK Data Protection Act 1998 and the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communcations Regulalations 2003 which protect data gathered and stored about living individuals: The data must only be used for the purpose for which it was collected and must be kept secure.

This public website does not display any information that can be used to identify a living person: Mostly living generations are excluded completely, but where this is difficult living individuals are only displayed as an initial and a birth to the nearest 10 years. It is only possible to identify a living person by knowing considerably more about them than is available here.

The private database used to generate the public pages is only available to genealogists researching the Easterbrook family and who are resident in the EU. Export from the EEA of the personal data is forbidden. Access to the EU located database from outside the EEA would be considered exporting.

3. Why have you created the site?

I started researching my own family tree and often spent considerable time trying to prove that a particular person was or was not related. It was easier to research each family as much as possible so that when a member of that family came up in a search I could eliminate them immediately and concentrate on new discoveries. Initially I only had my own family line on the website, but after being contacted by other researchers of the Easterbrook name I decided to put some of the other families on the website as well. When this started to generate leads that helped my own research I expanded the website to contain all of my genealogy research.

4. Can you put the all the certificates and other documentation on-line?

The UK certificates and census pages are subject to crown copyright (and non-UK are usually similarly protected), and most other sources are also restricted in some way, so I cannot just put everything on-line. If you let me know which family you are researching I will make available all documentation I have in electronic form on the understanding it is for genealogy research purposes only. However, I am unable to send anything relating to a living person outside the EEA because of UK Data Protection Act 1998 and the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communcations Regulalations 2003, and I also reserve the right to withhold any documentation if I believe it would break the privacy and confidentiality of anyone still living.

5. What application do you use to create the web pages? How do you create the family trees? How do you manage to keep it up to date?

The website is built on a Linux (SuSE or Ubuntu) system using mostly standard Unix-type command line tools and scripting languages. The main build scripts takes the variable content for each page and automatically adds the headers, footers, and contents navigation. The trees and reports are generated by using wget to the http interface to my genealogy database, GeneWeb. A set of sed, awk or perl scripts format the data appropriately and remove or obscure living individuals. The source for each page consists of the static content and instructions to wget/sed/awk/perl to include the dynamic information. The contact pages and guestbook are PHP scripts based on publically available example code but significantly modified to prevent abuse by spammers. If you are Linux literate and wish to do something similar I am willing to share my code.

6. Why is my family not listed? I cannot find my family but I know they lived in/came from X?

This site is a work-in-progress and a long-term research project. It is unlikely to cover most of the known Easterbrook families in the British Isles for many years. I started seriously researching the Easterbrook name at the end of 2005 and most of my research takes place during the winter months. At the current rate of progress I might be close to having most families in the British Isles by 2015!

A rough guide to the level of coverage is:

My own family line and families living in the same area are well covered. This is Holne (Devon) before 1820, Clerkenwell (London) 1840-1850s, then Charlton (Kent) and Lewisham (was Kent, now London).
The 1941-1901 censuses backed up by civil registration and other sources mean that the latter half of the 19th century is better covered than other periods. Pre-1940 depends mostly on parish records which vary considerably in quality and availability. The further back in time you go, the more difficult it becomes.
For post-1901 I depend mostly on descendants sharing their own family trees, so coverage is best for families that have an active researcher. Data about living persons are excluded from the public website so there is little information after the Great War.
Coverage of families varies widely depending on the availability of source documents and ease of research. Areas with relativily few Easterbrook families have been studied first.
I am only activily researching the British Isles. Details of families living elsewhere in the world have been donated by other researchers for which I am grateful. Only information that can be verified against the source material is included.

7. Can I/you put my family tree on your website?

If your family tree is relevent to the website, in other words you have a link to an Easterbrook, I am happy to put it on this website, subject to the following caveats:

It must be accurately researched and supported by original certificates and documents. This is to prevent misleading or incorrect information appearing.
I am able to publish it without showing any living persons. Anyone born after 1900 must have at least an estimated birth date, and a date of death if no longer alive. Generally there must be links back to before 1900 to make it worth publishing. (You don't need to exclude living persons from anything sent to me as long as there is enough information so that I can exclude them).
The tree is supplied in a format that I can use. Documents must be PDF, RTF or another portable format (please don't send MS Word documents with a DOC or DOCX extension). Scanned material should be JPEG files or similar, and not embedded in a document. Data from a genealogy program must be in a GEDCOM file. I work with Unix/Linux and am not able to read some material created on a Microsoft or Apple platform.

7. Why no 1911 data? Can you find the 1911 census record for my ancestor?

Access to the 1911 census is currently expensive and is only available on a pay-per-view basis. The cost of obtaining each Easterbrook record for analysis adds up very quickly when performing One-Name Study research. There also seems to be some questions about transcription accuracy. I have therefore decided not to examine the 1911 census at this time. The cost of scanning and transcribing the 1911 census is very high and the company with the sole contract is recovering these costs with high access fees. Once their initial costs have been covered, I expect the costs to reduce and for the records to be available on a subscription basis, at which time I will analyse the Easterbrook records.
UPDATE 2010: The 1911 census is now available on a subscription basis. I will subscribe and analyse it when I have time; unfortunately this will not be until later in the year and I anticipate will take at least a few months to complete.

Easterbrook Family History Last Updated: Site 2010-08-26 Page 2010-04-26

© Copyright Mark Easterbrook 2003-2010 (Southampton, Hampshire, England).
The Family Tree diagrams and reports are generated from a GeneWeb database.
The information on this page must be used only for personal genealogy purposes. Commercial use is not permitted.