Posts in February 24, 2026

I’ve been told to not speak ill of the dead more than once. Non-genealogists are sometimes told this when a relative or a family has a challenging personality, has caused family conflict, or been involved in questionable activities. Sometimes it’s a fine line of how much to share and preserve and what to edit out—particularly when the events are not recorded or preserved in other ways such as newspapers, court records, .or other publicly available records. I’m pretty liberal in sharing what was in a newspaper or public court record—things were known at the time anyway. Occasionally there may be something on a publicly availably death certificate that was not publicly available at the time the document was recorded. But those things such as family squabbles and the […]