How this site treats people
Privacy and security
What we publish about the living, and what we do not
A family history is about people, and a good many of them are still alive. This page sets out what that means here, in plain terms, so that nothing about the site has to be guessed at.
Living members of the family
Living members appear by first name and year of birth, and by nothing else. No surnames, no middle names, no full dates, no places of birth or residence.
There are no photographs of any living member of the family anywhere on this site. Where a likeness is wanted, a stylised drawing may stand in, and it is captioned as a drawing rather than passed off as a portrait.
Both of those are decisions about privacy and about security, and we would rather state them than leave a reader wondering what is missing. The gaps are deliberate. They are care, not oversight.
Contact details
No address, telephone number or email address of any member of the family is published here, quoted here, or reproduced anywhere on this site. That holds for every member, living or otherwise, and it is not decided case by case.
Those who are no longer living
People who died long ago are treated as history, because that is what they have become. Portraits, dates, places and the judgements of historians all appear. Where a person died within living memory, we are more careful, and we prefer the family’s own account of them to an outsider’s.
What this site collects from you
Nothing that identifies you, as far as this site itself is concerned. There are no accounts, no comment boxes, no newsletter and, for now, no contact form, and there are no advertising or visitor-tracking tools of any kind. The site sets no cookies for visitors; cookies are used only by the family’s own editors when they sign in to work on it.
The typefaces and the map are served from this site itself, so reading a page does not send your address to anyone else.
A few interactive pages remember a small setting in your own browser — that a hint has already been shown, for example — so that it is not shown again. That stays on your device and never reaches us.
Like every web host, ours — Infomaniak, in Switzerland — keeps a standard log of requests: the address a request came from, the time, the page asked for and the kind of browser. It is used for security and to keep the site running, and it is kept only for a short period.
If any of this changes — when a way to write to us is added, for instance — this page will say so first.