On living people

The editorial principles by which this archive handles living individuals' personal information. Plain-language; no legal language.

The principle

Living people get a light touch. The genealogical record is rich, but the public site is not the place to surface every detail of every living family member.

The practical rules:

• No specific birth dates (day or month) for living people unless they have explicitly opted in. Birth year may appear in context for figures whose age is already public (Chuck is on the Stanford faculty; his year is in his university bio).
• No exact home locations — street addresses, neighborhoods, specific towns — for living people who haven't opted in. Broader geography (state, country, the city of an on-the-record public role) may appear when it serves the narrative.
• No minor children's names. Children mentioned in adults' obituaries or family records are referred to in general terms on the public site.
• The address appendix is offline. Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 family register includes a contact-address appendix. That appendix is kept in the private family archive; the rest of the register is published.
• Letters that the family has marked private remain private. See the curation principle on the Letters from Vietnam page.

How the site enforces this

The people collection has a living: true flag. A helper called publicDisplay hides the header vitals (birth date, birth place, aka, summary) for anyone with that flag set. In addition, the source markdown for living-flagged pages has been cleaned of specific dates and locations in both frontmatter and body text — so that the publicly-published HTML and the underlying source on GitHub stay consistent.

The owner exception

Chuck Eesley, who keeps the archive, has chosen to leave his own page in normal form. The general rule applies to everyone else with living: true.

The opt-in path

If you are a family member with a page here and you'd like to add detail — or take detail away — please contact Chuck directly. The site is built to be easy to update.

Disclosure of AI-generated content

Where this archive contains AI-generated visual material — for example the animated portrait of Lijie's grandfather Zhongchu Li, the animated portrait of her grandfather Zhaoxiang Zhou, the animated portrait of her father Ling Zhou, and the colorization of Robert Earl in the 1965 Stanford fountain photograph — the AI involvement is disclosed inline. The underlying still photograph is the historical artifact; the animation or colorization is presented as a small visual aid generated from it, not as a moving image of the person.

Why this archive exists

The site is the next round in a long line of family record-keeping — from Mary Eesley Bean's 1985 indented register, to Margaret "Maggie" Eesley's "Four Generations" photographic catalogue, to Robert Earl Wildermuth's 1990 Wildermuth/Fleming Heritage, to Dale Eesley's ongoing FamilySearch tree. The previous generations of keepers built the structured record; this site is the narrative layer that sits on top of it.

The privacy posture is meant to keep that record open enough to be useful to future genealogists — the explicit audience Robert Earl addressed at the end of his memoir — while keeping the lives of living family members in their own hands.