Copying Census Data from Ancestry to Reunion Notes

[W Houston]

I have hundreds of .jpg files of individual census pages downloaded to my hard drive from Ancestry and linked to Reunion as multimedia files. Many of them are pre-1850 and have no description above the columns to notate what is being counted in each column, i.e. Males under 10, males 10-15, etc.

When calling these pages up in Ancestry, you first access a page that shows the column headings and counts before you can take the next step and call up the actual census page. Is there some way that I can take the data from the preliminary page and past it into Reunion in the Notes area? That way I wouldn't have to constantly double check the column descriptions by referring to another window or to a paper document while viewing the original census page files in Reunion.

The data on the "preliminary" page copies to a Sticky but I haven't been able to copy it into Reunion as a note.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to accomplish this or an alternative which might work better. I am trying to avoid typing the data into Reunion from the original census pages. If I can get the data in the Notes field it will be much easier to make corrections as needed as opposed to retyping everything from scratch.

Thank you very much,

William

[W Houston]

Re: Copying Census Data from Ancestry to Reunion Notes

One last thought. Any copyright issue here? No publication is intended.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Copying Census Data from Ancestry to Reunion Notes

One last thought. Any copyright issue here? No publication is intended.

Not to worry, I think. As noted in the U.S. Census Bureau's FAQs, in U.S. law, Title 17 U.S.C., Section 105 states that there is no copyright protection for products of the U.S. federal government. The census is not copyrighted.

The legal decision in the Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. case found that scanning a two dimensional document is not a creative act, and so Ancestry also has no defensible claim to copyright on a scan of a public domain document. They would also probably not be interested in suing you to try to establish such a hypothetical claim.

[W Houston]

Re: Copying Census Data from Ancestry to Reunion Notes

Thanks Dennis. Another reason I want to copy the preliminary page to the census page into my notes is that so many of the originals are faded and afflicted with bleed through it is very helpful to be able to refer to Ancestry's reading of the data without having to open a new window and go through five or six different steps to get to the page within Ancestry itself. Hope that makes sense.

[bmohr]

Re: Copying Census Data from Ancestry to Reunion Notes

One last thought. Any copyright issue here? No publication is intended.

There are two issues in play here: copyright and contract. As Dennis mentioned, works of the US Government are not subject to copyright, so there's no need to worry about that. But by subscribing to and using Ancestry.com, you're also subject to their Terms & Conditions, which do limit your ability to disseminate their content. If you violate the T&C, you've broken the contract, but haven't broken the law. (I haven't used Ancestry in a library or FHC in ages, so I don't know whether you have to click through a similar agreement before using the site that way.)

That being said, Ancestry's terms allow you to download and/or republish content you obtain on Ancestry, so long as the images in question relate to your own research. As I understand it, they mostly want to stop you from setting up your own "FreeAncestry.com" site to give away or sell their content.

When I asked their Member Services people about this issue a few years back, this is what they had to say:

Thank you for your inquiry. As long as the images in question apply to your genealogy, you are within the limits of the copyright (sic) agreement on Ancestry.com and can post them to an individual site.

Keep in mind that the situation may be different for records created by states or foreign governments. Scans of UK census records, for example, are subject to Crown Copyright even if the underlying record has long since entered the public domain. Even in that case, though, you are free to download the images and use them as you wish, so long as you don't re-publish them in image form (transcriptions are fine).

-Brad