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A new year always brings new opportunities for discovery when one is working on family history, and 2008 will be a great year for discoveries. We know this because current events often drive behavior.
It is only logical that we look for more cost effective ways to do research. If a 20 gallon tank of gas costs $60.00, then a full subscription to a site like Ancestry.com is a bargain. Today you can learn more in a month from your house than you used to be able to learn in a lifetime on foot. Sometimes difficult circumstances force us to do what we probably should do anyway. |
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This past month we spent a lot of valuable time converting all the photographs from the old web site to the new one. This process took quite some time since we wanted to standardize sizes, repair old photograph issues like tears and scratches, and label each one as to content. |
| We are happy to say that we accomplished what we were striving for and all 315 photographs are now on the new site. There may be a few that have been forwarded to me in the past month or so that I will need to catch up on when I can, but the bulk of the work is done. |
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This month I also did a little more work on the family pages. The basic structure for the families of Comer, Fulcher, Gregory, Southerland, Whitehead, and Wise is there. Like everything else in this venture this has become a learning process.
For each family we are adding narrative information about our great-grandparents and their children. Where we have it, we are adding information about the migration path for our |
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| ancestors and their descendants. The best illustration is on the page for the Wise family, although none of these can be considered complete.. |
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This coming month we will start back in on the conversion of the cemetery records to make them searchable and easier to identify.
This effort will be much larger than the photograph work and could take more than a month to complete. As I mentioned before, this work is also quite tedious (and boring) and I will probably intersperse it with other work over the next few months. |
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There is always more to be done on any web site, and this one is no exception. That said, I am starting to see an end to the transfer of information from the old site, which will free me up to do new work.
The good news is that things are starting to come together like we had hoped and the standardization of many of the site elements is paying dividends.
Since most of you cannot see behind the scenes into the structure of the site I can assure you that what might seem easy is often not easy. Right now this site has just over 12,000 things on it (pages, pictures, documents, etc.). When completed we will be closer to 20,000. So little things become impossible in that environment unless a good structure is there.
Thanks to all, and let's have a great genealogical year in 2008! |
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