Terms of Service & Volunteer Training Agreement

The KHGN Volunteer Skill Labs are provided entirely free of charge as a peer-to-peer, gamified skills-training space. The platform's sole purpose is to support our 501(c)(3) nonprofit mission: to foster historical interest, train community volunteers in transcription workflows, and preserve the heritage of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The user acknowledges that this platform is not an accredited institution, college, university, or vocational trade school. Completing modules, unlocking tiers, or earning badges does not confer an academic degree, professional title, or licensed vocational status.

The User agrees that they will never request, upload, or input the personal identities, names, birth dates, modern residences, or sensitive details of any living individual into this public-facing training platform. All data tracking, pedigree charts, and practice chronicles must operate exclusively under a Deceased Baseline — only historical figures who are confirmed deceased. KHGN reserves the right to immediately delete, without warning, any user data or training file suspected of exposing the private information of a living citizen.

The User agrees to contribute only raw, unprotected historical facts — names, dates, locations, and raw record citations — to the network's databases. Copying, pasting, or importing creative or expressive content from third parties is strictly prohibited. This includes proprietary digital search indexes, curated database layouts, family history book chapters, modern blog entries, or narrative biographies written by other researchers. Users may only upload photographs of historical headstones or public records that they have personally captured in the field, or images explicitly released into the public domain.

Any training module involving historical land deeds, metes-and-bounds measurements, or plat dimensions is strictly an exercise in historical document abstraction and ancestral neighborhood visualization. Under Kentucky Revised Statute (KRS) Chapter 322, only a licensed Professional Land Surveyor may establish physical boundary lines, determine modern real estate limits, or draft plats for legal records. This platform is not a surveying tool. The User agrees never to apply these historical exercises to active modern property disputes. Training in county probate or deed books does not qualify the user to perform professional real estate title searches, legal abstracting, or practice real estate law.

As a user unlocks higher tiers on the platform, they may be given administrative privileges to answer public lookup requests in KHGN community spaces. The User agrees to maintain a helpful, polite, and completely neutral tone. All community lookups must consist solely of documented public facts backed by clean, verifiable source citations. Speculative commentary, personal gossip, or undocumented myths must not be presented as historical fact. This platform is strictly non-commercial — users are explicitly barred from utilizing KHGN training tools, databases, or public spaces to market paid genealogy services or direct traffic to personal commercial links.

All training data, system modules, and historical record tools are provided on an "as-is" and "as-available" basis. KHGN makes no guarantees regarding the total historical accuracy or uptime of the system. The User agrees to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Kentucky History & Genealogy Network Inc., its directors, officers, and volunteers from any and all claims, liabilities, damages, or legal expenses (including attorney fees) arising from the user's misuse of training data, violations of copyright law, privacy breaches, or unauthorized application of skills in real-world legal or property disputes.

KHGN retains absolute authority over the platform's digital spaces. Any violation of these terms — specifically compromising the privacy of a living person, repeating copyright infringement, or using the nonprofit portal for commercial profit — will result in the immediate, permanent deletion of the user's training account and a ban from all associated network communities.