Ethics and Family History: Challenges, Dilemmas and Responsibilities

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Genealogy invites contributions on the topic of ethics and family history: challenges, dilemmas and responsibilities.

Family history is a popular leisure pastime, with millions of people using pay-to-view and sometimes free online tools and resources to research their family stories. Over the last ten years or so, genetic genealogy—DNA sequencing and matching services—has provided powerful new tools to researchers. In collecting data from millions of people, DNA testing services and comparison websites offer, as Julie Creet puts it, “infinitely expanding relatives and infinitely receding origins” (de Groot, 2019).

This has provided new opportunities for researchers to extend the range of their research, and to find connections with more distant living and dead relatives. In the process, we may discover personal secrets about individual family members, or uncomfortable truths about our family history requiring us to make decisions about whether and how to share this information (Smart, 2009). This is difficult for any family historian, but perhaps more so for ‘non-professionals’ working without the experience of research codes of practice and formal ethical guidelines.

Commercially run family-tree websites and DNA comparison websites contain billions of records worldwide, and inevitably encounter conflicting objectives, including making money and managing privacy and data protection concerns, as well as providing accurate scientific and historical content. In changing social, political and scientific contexts - for example, developments in forensic genetic genealogy, and the testing of samples of deceased relatives (McKibbin, Shabani and Larmuseau, 2023) - there are likely to be new challenges, and it is timely to consider how these conflicts may be managed ethically, and what principles should be applied.

This Special Issue aims to bring together a collection of work on current and developing ethical issues in the field of family history, and their implications for professional and non-professional practitioners, members of the public, commercial organisations, and institutions, policy makers and legislators. Contributions are invited from any relevant discipline (including humanities, law, genetics, health and social care, sociology) and from practitioners and professional genealogists.

Topics relevant for this Special Issue include (but are not limited to) the following:

• How family historians perceive and manage ethical concerns in practice.
• Telling difficult stories ethically.
• The ethical relationship between family history research and current/historical issues of social justice.
• Genetic genealogy and the interests and rights of indigenous people.
• Ethical responsibilities to the dead.
• The implications of the commercialisation and commodification of family history research.
• Consumer DNA testing and the rise of forensic genetic genealogy.
• Codes of practice and ethical guidelines.

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication will be waived for papers accepted for this special edition.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (drhelenscholar@gmail.com) or to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review. Potential authors may contact the guest editor by email for informal discussion if required.

References

de Groot, J. “The Genealogical sublime”: An Interview with Julie Creet. Int. Public Hist. 2019, 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/iph-2019-0017.

McKibbin, K.; Shabani, M.; Larmuseau, M.H.D. From collected stamps to hair locks: ethical and legal implications of testing DNA found on privately owned family artifacts. Hum. Genet. 2023, 142, 331–341. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00439-022-02508-y.

Smart, C. Family Secrets: Law and Understandings of Openness in Everyday Relationships. J. Soc. Policy 2009, 38, 551–67.

Dr. Helen Scholar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• ethics and family history
• ethics and genetic genealogy
• family secrets
• data privacy
• ethical responsibilities to the living and dead