Douglas County GenWeb

Mission Statement and Citations -- The mission of this site is to provide useful free information for researchers on Douglas County Missouri and its families. It contains works by various individuals who have granted permission for it to be displayed here. They spent a lot of time to create these works with little or no monetary gain. Their names are all identified with the work they created. Please recognize these people when you use part of these works to supplement your own. Under the concept of “fair use”, you can quote parts of a publication in your work, but you must property attribute the material to its author or creator. PLEASE USE GOOD JUDGMENT and recognize the people who have helped in your research by properly attributing their work. Here’s an example of a citation: Source--Profession Genealogy: A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians. Elizabeth Shown Mills, editor. 2001

Copyrights and Good Ethics -- This site is copyrighted to protect the many creators of the body of work contained here. Use this information freely but tell your readers where you acquired the information. A copyright comes into existence when a work is created. Only “original works of authorship” can be protected by copyright. An example of this would be cemetery records – if you copy names and dates from a cemetery, that in itself might not be copyrightable, unless you have added information to it, such as compiling multiple cemeteries into one source, such as Laine Sutherland’s (et al) Gone But Not Forgotten: Cemetery Survey of the Eastern District, Douglas County , Missouri (1995). My own transcriptions of Fairview and Oak Forest Cemetery are also copyrighted, because I added additional information not available on the headstones. For works created after 1978, copyright protection lasts for the “life of the author, plus seventy years”. For works created before 1978, the protection is good for a maximum of 95 years, with a minimum of 28 years. Note that “official government publications are not eligible for copyright in any form by anyone” – the information can be used, as it is public domain, but you cannot call it your original work.

Kristi Towe, Coordinator



All images from Brown's Digital Photo Collection are considered to be in the public domain and may be downloaded and reprinted as the user desires. Kenneth Brown -- December 7, 2007