Hi: I know it puzzles a few, confuses a few more, and angers some of those, but at least in the U.S.A. it is a matter of settled law that *nobody* under *any* circumstances can claim ownership of facts. If I spend thousands of dollars and countless hours researching the date and place of a person named John SMITH's birth, and finally prove it, and it "gets out" in any way, then any person who wishes to do so is legally entitled to state that John SMITH was born on that date at that place. Period. This is not only the way it is, it is the way it *ought* to be. How would you like to find that, because someone else had discovered who your grandfather was before you did, that you were not permitted to claim him? Think about it ... What is emphatically *not* ethical is for anyone to state that John SMITH was born on that date at that place and to claim or imply that the research was original with that person, if it is not; it is *not* ethical for anyone to quote primary sources as if that person had seen them, when that person has not; and it is not only unethical but illegal to quote an original researcher's exact words describing the reasoning behind a conclusion without giving full credit to that original researcher. I have had a tremendous amount of information passed down to me by those now gone. I hope to pass on the results of my own research in the same way. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, both in our ancestry and in the study of that ancestry. Credit should be given where credit is due. But nobody owns genealogy. Darrell darrellm@sprynet.com descendant of Nathaniel Williams of Mass. Valley Forge patriot http://www.darrell-martin.net/genealogy/