Thanks to Mike Goad for providing this excellent quotation and the source it came from. "A genealogy consisting merely of transcriptions of public records, such as census or courthouse records, or transcriptions made from headstones in a few local cemeteries, are also deemed by the Copyright Office to lack minimal creativity. On the other hand, the creativity requirement may be satisfied if the creator of a genealogy compilation USES JUDGEMENT IN SELECTING MATERIAL FROM A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT SOURCES (my emphasis)." A genealogy is defined by the Random House College Dictionary (1982) as "a record or account of the ancestry and descent of a person, family, group, etc." "the study of family ancestries and histories" "lineage". Genealogies are different from compilations of church baptisms or cemetery gravestones. Assuming that the Copyright Office understood that difference, it sounds like sentence 1 above says that a genealogy is not copyrightable. But, sentence 2 seems to say that most of them would be. It is difficult to imagine a serious genealogy that doesn't satisfy sentence 2. A person constructing a family tree normally would concentrate on their own branch of the tree which descendended from a progenitor. And they would include all generations along the way. Since the ancestors of both members of every set of spouses are also the ancestors of the person constructing the genealogy, they would all be included. No copyright so far, because including everyone doesn't involve much judgement. Including the normal information of birth, marriage and death and all children for a married couple doesn't show much judgement. However, what if there were frequently two or three sources of a date or place of birth (or marriage or death) for some of the people? Now judgement would be required to "select" the data that will be recorded in a genealogy. If a person looks at the information on one of the largest sites, that of the Latter Day Saints, they will find much conflicting data for a single individual that was submitted by perhaps ten different people. The person must use judgement to sort these out, and may even compare the data with that of several other websites (having equally conflicting data) before making a final judgement. Does this make the genealogy copyrightable? A person must choose to include or exclude all of the siblings of ancestors in their genealogy. A person must decide whether to include sources for major amounts of their data, or just a selected few pieces of data, or none of their data. By this time, it sounds to me like the genealogy qualifies for copyright. Personally, I am against copyrighting genealogies even if it can be done. But, the big question is this. With so much conflicting information available in book or internet sources, doesn't a genealogy constitute one person's opinion rather than just a compilation of facts? It is not likely to be completely accurate as to the facts, and may even include wrong people in it. It sounds to me like any serious genealogy (requiring more than a minimum of research) would be copyrightable. That having been said, what protection would such a copyright give the author? Could I also publish a genealogy with all of the same people in it (presented differently), even if some of them were wrong? I don't think a valid copyright on a genealogy prevents other people from using the data. Isn't a valid copyright on a genealogy almost useless to the author? Cliff