Have you ever tried to investigate your ancestry, to understand where you came from?
I tried to do this when I was a kid, through a combination of people-based research (asking my grandparents), and writing to public records offices to look for old birth certificates. I may even have looked at some old gravestones hoping to find a family name listed on the tomb.
These days, the internet has made this a lot easier – and there’s a great website called Geni.com, which has crowd-sourced this effort. You can go in there and enter the information you know about your family tree, and then it compares that to all the information other people have entered, and when it finds an overlap it will connect the trees together, to extend it further.
As a result, I can tell you that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was named Malcolm Groat, and he was born in 1664 in Canisbay, Scotland. (The last town at the northern tip of Scotland is John O’Groats, and Canisbay is about 2 miles away.) He was married to Anna Groat (née Swannie) and their great-great granddaughter Elizabeth married into the Mackay family, and her great-great granddaughter was my Mom (also a Mackay).
Industry Traceback Group
Amateur genealogists are not the only ones who like to trace back into the past to discover history. One of the key parts of the new anti-robocalling infrastructure these past few years is US Telecom’s Industry Traceback Group (ITG). This organization investigates illegal robocalls, by starting with the recipient, then working back in time through each preceding service provider, until they (hopefully) discover where the call originated.
The FCC announced new rules as part of the Seventh Report and Order related to Unlawful Robocalls, whereby service providers are required to respond to traceback requests within 24 hours (with an expectation that it’s typically “a few hours”).
There’s no requirement for you to do anything proactive to register with the traceback group, but when investigating a request, the ITG will reach out to you using contact information from its own database (from previous tracebacks) or from contact information provided by your upstream provider, or by using the contact information from the Robocall Mitigation Database.
If contacted, you then need to investigate the call in question, to identify where it came from. If the call is still available in your Metaswitch Service Assurance Server (SAS) logs, then you should have complete information about the call, but if the request is for an older call, that’s no longer present, you may be relying solely on CDRs from your billing system.
There’s more information available at the ITG’s website, but I wanted to share this with you so you know that you have a legal obligation not only to cooperate, but also to respond very promptly to any requests you received – which has now been defined as “within 24 hours”.
I’d be curious to know if any of my readers have handled a traceback request, and if so, what that was like. Please drop me a line if so.
