One of my long-term goals has been to determine the final resting place of as many in my direct line of ancestry as possible. One of the stumbling blocks for years has been finding one of my great-great-grandfathers, specifically David M. Reynolds. His wife and his in-laws are all buried at Hockessin Friends in New Castle County (though I somehow managed to miss finding them myself when I was there), but David is not with them. records from Nottingham-Little Britain mentioned his death but did not specify where he was buried, but my gut reaction was that he was probably at Penn Hill. When I was there in 2011, I failed to find him, but it’s a big place and there are lots of stones. And, then , lo and behold, this past Monday, a web search turned up a picture of David’s stone at last and the caption reads Penn Hill! (The picture has since been removed, but the information remains.)

And then things start to get kind of weird. The picture is on a site that runs the TNG software as I do and the first thing I notice is in the upper left corner was a picture, not of David, but of his wife Amanda, and it just happened to be the exact photograph of Amanda that is hanging on the wall in my living room. Hmmm. That particular photograph appears in my own TNG database as well as on at least one of my other sites, but I have never had anyone ask permission to use the photo, so it was a bit disturbing to see it on a site with which I have no connection. It didn’t take long to find more things to raise my hackles. David’s son Isaac’s page also contained photographs taken from my site, as did several other pages on the site, all of which credit a particular person (not that site’s owner) with being the source/owner of the photographs. Just to make it more bizarre, several of the photos were linked to the wrong people and the captions were wrong. The will of my great-grandfather, that I personally transcribed, also appears there, credited incorrectly. Altogether I found a dozen photographs taken from my site, all crediting the same person. So, after quite a bit of back and forth with the site owner, most of the photographs have been taken down – why the last few remain is beyond me. It might be interesting to see how long she takes to remove those last few photos, but there’s more to this saga.

This morning, while working on some updates for some of my Lancaster County Quaker records, I decided to take a look at FindAGrave to see how some of my info compared, focusing on Penn Hill and Eastland, since I have photographed lots of the stones in both of those locations. Want to guess what I found? Yep, more of my photos, all uploaded by the same person who took credit for my work on that other site.  Nine photos were uploaded altogether, mostly from Penn Hill, but a few from Eastland as well. I think I’m detecting a pattern here; hopefully, FindAGrave will too and suspend the account for this person.

Ironically, when I suggested Judy Russell’s site on Legal Genealogy as an excellent resource for understanding issues of this sort, the site-owner informed me that she did not need to look at Judy’s site as she was aware of the fair use laws. Really?

So, if you’ve photographed gravestones in this general area, especially if you have Reynolds connections, you may want to browse around the web a bit and make sure your photographs aren’t being used without permission. If you’re like me, you probably have a good bit of time and money invested in your research – it’s not right for others to take the credit for what you’ve accomplished!