| At some point you might want to consider "pivoting" to a gigantic database of all dead humans: there would be fewer data protection and privacy issues! I have sometimes wanted to trace people's ancestry, or, more often, the descendents (of the parents) of a person who died half a century ago. It's depressing how difficult it is to look these things up. Various companies try to sell access to public records, but I don't do this often enough to be interested in paying for a subscription. With something like this you should really also publish exactly where the information came from. There's a big difference between "an anonymous contributor supplied this" and "this comes from a database that we downloaded from whatever.gov.uk on this date and here's a copy of that database in case you want to check". Some things that almost everyone is already aware of but I'll mention them anyway: * The concepts of "first name" and "last name" only apply to some cultures. * Most people have more than one name: women who change their name when they get married, middle names that may or may not get mentioned, names that are frequently abbreviated ("Kate" might be "Kate" or "Catherine" or ...), punctuation and diacritics that may be modified or omitted, Macdonald/McDonald/Mac Donald/..., various ways of transcribing the same name from a different alphabet, ... |