Hope to hear from you.

Regards

Sheila

Our database is a part of the Gurd One Name Study and has been published on the internet, to help Gurd descendants put their direct line trees together. We are always pleased to hear from Gurd researchers, as I have more material than is online and may be able to help someone who has hit a ‘brick wall’.

We have noticed lately that on the Genesreunited site in particular, people are loading large chunks of our data online as their own work. We have no problem at all, with anyone adding their direct line to Genes R, but draw the line at that point. If they want to do any more than that, they have to ask our permission, because of our copyright, which is printed on every page of the database.

Two bad experiences last year when our entire Gurd database was downloaded and republished, have made us wary and weren’t in the true spirit of family research, where we all try to help each other. At that time one of the people also circulated details of living descendants gained from the Genesreunited site and caused a lot of distress.

Our work is registered with the Guild of One Name Studies. I’m sure you know that facts such as dates etc, cannot be copyrighted, BUT when these facts are combined to form a database, document etc, the copyright laws apply. All we ask is that researchers respect this and stick to just their direct line on their internet sites. We have no problem with them adding more to their private database.If they want others to see the tree as a whole, they can give them the URL of our database.

We don’t want to be killjoys – quite the opposite. We hope that new Gurd researchers who haven’t yet contacted us about their Gurd family research, will get in touch through the message point on the database. As I said at the beginning of my message, there are family Wills and other documents which we will be pleased to share with them, which will give them a much broader picture of our Gurd ancestors. Over the years we have been working on the tree,we have proved that almost every Gurd in England and overseas descends from one couple who lived in Wiltshire in the 16th century. There is a relatively small Irish branch but the general feeling is that they may also descend from an English Gurd. We are considering running a Gurd DNA test next year, which will hopefully confirm this and tell us more about our Gurd roots.
Sorry to have taken up space on your blog, but when you mentioned the errors, I felt researchers would like to know there is help and information available.

Good luck with your CURD research
With best wishes, Dot