Libeau Family Book Update

Last updated 12 December 2024.

Overview

We are working on an update to The Libeau Family of Banks Peninsula, last revised in 2012.

The former publisher Evagean Software has discontinued support for the current book. Unfortunately, Evagean has declined to return the book content in electronic form, so we have no option but to re-create all of the content by hand.

The broad outline of our plan is in three phases:

  1. Digitise the 2012 book (tree structure, biographies, and photos)
  2. Update the digitised content to correct errors and to add new people, by asking for submissions from family members.
  3. Publish the updated tree, biographies and photos in a new printed book. Also, publish parts of the tree online, while respecting privacy of living people.

The remainder of this page discusses these points in greater detail. If you would prefer to listen to the project summary, please open our Powerpoint presentation from the 2024 A.G.M.

Phase 1 - Digitise the 2012 book

This phase consists of converting the 2012 edition to an Ancestry.com private member tree.
This format has been chosen because:

  • it is free to use
  • people may be familiar with editing these trees already
  • the tree can be downloaded in GEDCOM format
  • most importantly, multiple people can work on it simultaneously

While the project is in progress, this tree will remain private. It may be published (with living people hidden) on completion of the project.

The Phase 1 project page includes instructions and guidelines for data entry. Please contact us via email if you’re willing to do data entry via Ancestry.com (no cost involved).

Phase 2 - the Forever tree

Once phase 1 is complete and frozen as a digital representation of the 2012 book, we will clone it and call it the Forever tree. We will fix mistakes and add new information, based on a combination of user submissions and original research.

Descendants may submit new information from the submissions page. Descendants may submit data in any format, and we will save the submissions to the Phase 2 resource page given above. Submissions will be saved using a naming convention to help organise them according to which part of the book they apply to. (This has not yet been defined.) Submissions via the Google Form will remain visible via the Google Forms interface as well.

Phase 3 - Publishing

It is very much up for discussion what exactly we will publish and in what format. The Committee meetings and AGM will explore this topic: in 2024 and beyond, what do people want to have on their bookshelf and what do people want to have online? The size of the printed material is very much a consideration here; the 2012 book was already big, and the Forever tree will only continue to grow.

Other points

Privacy of Living People, and online publication

This is a very important issue. The Personal Data of living people - which includes their birth date, birth year, name, birth place, marriage place, spouse’s name - is protected by law in many countries including New Zealand. It is unethical - and may even be illegal - to publish data of living people who have not personally consented.

The 2012 book contains a lot of Personal Data of living people and we do not have evidence of who may have consented to their data being published. For example, contributors may have given details of their living relatives, including their children, without obtaining consent.

For this reason, I am strongly against making any information available online regarding living people.

PDF Copies of the 2012 book

This is now covered under the submission page.

2012 book miscellaneous errata

  • Google Doc link - currently this list excludes corrections that are part of descendant submissions.