Terms, rights and attribution

What this archive is

BEFORE TILL is an independent public-history project documenting the Smith–Tolliver family. It is research in progress, published in public beta, and its conclusions are revisable as new evidence appears.

It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking on behalf of any museum, university, government body, or the estates of the people it documents.

Research and writing

The research design, evidence analysis, written interpretation, and presentation of this archive are the work of Amberly R. Carter-Mills and Hello Ambi, LLC, and are protected as such.

You may quote from the archive for scholarship, journalism, teaching, and family research with attribution. You may not republish the archive wholesale, mirror its contents, or present its research as your own work.

Historical records

Census returns, probate papers, Freedmen's Bureau records, and similar government documents are public records and carry no copyright of ours.

Digitized images of those records are frequently owned or licensed by the repository holding them. Where that is the case the archive cites and links to the repository rather than republishing the image, and you should do the same.

Photographs and derived likenesses

Family photographs remain the property of the families and repositories that hold them and are published here by permission or under fair use for scholarly commentary.

Where the archive publishes a digital restoration of a degraded photograph, it is labelled a derived likeness, captioned with the original it was restored from, and must be described that way in any reuse. A derived likeness may never be presented as an archival photograph.

How to cite the archive

Suggested form: Amberly R. Carter-Mills, "[Page or claim title]," BEFORE TILL: The Living Evidence Archive, beforetill.com, accessed [date]. Include the record's persistent identifier where one is shown.

Cite the underlying source as well as this archive. Every claim page provides both.

Contributions

By submitting a record, photograph, or account you confirm you have the right to share it and you grant the archive permission to publish it with attribution.

You keep ownership of what you send. You may ask for it to be withdrawn from public view at any time.

No warranty

This archive is provided as it stands, in beta, without warranty. Evidence statuses tell you how much confidence to place in each statement; read them before relying on anything for legal, financial, or genealogical certification purposes.