From:
Naudia Lennie
Tuktoyaktuk
Is your family tree or family history safe? Do you know who is in your family tree? Who has this information now? Who has the right to add or take out of your family tree?
Just recently I went to an office in Inuvik and saw some family information on a white flip-chart paper, the information was on my father and grandfather. This information was wrong, what was frightening was this information was being gathered to share with the public. When asked why my family was not contacted to verify this. The reply was that they tried to contact one sibling. There are 10 in my family. I also inquired how they had gotten this information on my family, the reply was that they had spoken to elders in the ISR region. I asked for any documentation such as tape or signed documents of this information gathering, again I was told that they spoke to elders within my large family, however, were not willing to share who or how this information was gathered.
The information that I saw had said that my father had an older sister, we have never ever heard of and also had my grandfather with a brother that was in fact his first cousin. Had I not gone in and saw this, the people in this office would have gone on and printed this information without our family consent.
Do people have the right to add people to your family tree just because they are an Elder? I know who my parents are and who their siblings are, I can go back to my great great grandparents on my father’s side and my great-grandmother on my mothers side and know who their siblings are.
On a site that you can work on your family tree, my siblings and I were doing a lot of work on our family tree and we noticed that there was additional information added. We saw that this information was coming from a person that had no authorization or family ties to us. We left the site, we could not delete any of our hard work, now that family tree is no longer accurate.
So again, do you know who you are? Now that our Elders are gone, who has this information and who can you trust? Now that my parents, my aunts and uncle are passed, as far as I’m concerned any information collected on my family without our input now, will be considered false and inaccurate.
Thank you.