Go to the mobile version of this Web site.

Login | Contact Us | Site Map | Paid archives | Electronic edition | Subscription Questions | Extras

Album seller settles case

Marketing of family books to change

Rachel Brand, Rocky Mountain News

Published February 10, 2006 at midnight

Text size  

More More Business

More stories »

An Arapahoe County company accused of deceptively promoting genealogy albums will pay a $30,000 fine, cover $25,000 in legal fees and revamp how it markets its Family Yearbooks.

Maxwell MacMaster and his Parker-based company MorphCorp. advertised the $45 "family history" books as unique to an individual's surname. The company promised its yearbooks would summarize 2,000 years of a particular family's history.

But the tomes were not published annually and contained no pictures of the buyer's family members.

"The 'Family Yearbook' was nothing more than a photocopy of the same material deceptively sold to thousands of consumers," Attorney General John Suthers, who negotiated the settlement, said in a statement.

Jeffery Scism, a San Bernardino, Calif., genealogist who has tracked MacMaster for years, said the fine is puny when compared with the hundreds of thousands of dollars he believes -MorphCorp raked in.

"The only fairest solution would be to seize the business, liquidate the assets and put them in a holding company," said Scism, who lists the company on his "Genealogy Hall of Shame" Web site, blacksheep.rootsweb.com.

Nobody answered the phone Thursday at MorphCorp, 1181 S. Parker Road, and a message left with the company's outside counsel, Burton Wherry of Denver's Wherry & Carlstead LLC, was not returned.

Here's how the books worked: If you were a customer named John Smith, MacMaster would send you a letter identifying himself as your distant relative. He would promise to sell you a yearbook authored by someone in the Smith clan and containing jokes and recipes from the Smith family.

"Essentially what they'd do is stick a few telephone listings in there and names changed from the Census Bureau," Scism said.

MacMaster is now barred from pretending to be related to potential customers and advertising that a "contributing family member" wrote the text.

In addition, MorphCorp. must provide refunds to those who request them. If the company refuses, customers may complain to the Colorado consumer line, 1-800-222-4444.

or 303-892-5269