GACHATTA-L Archives

From: "Carol Johnson" <>
Subject: Our Pages
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 22:22:05 -0700

Your notes of appreciation and love to Lea & I continue to come in,
deluging our in-boxes. Thank you all so much for having allowed us
to even begin the journey to try to do adequate justice to this 4
county region.

Being County Coordinators has been such a totally awesome and
terrific experience, allowing us the priviledge to correspond with you,
perhaps even help you somewhat?? And the miracle of meeting some
of you the first time, as though old friends.

And, we can pretty well guarantee that the more digging we did,
scurrying to answer your questions, provided us a more knowledgeable
background also. There are no words to express our gratitude for what you
gave us in return.

It quickly became apparent to me that while I was from out of state and
had not had direct access to the Georgia records, most of you were either
from Ga or had at least visited there to do research. Me? I've just been
hurrying to"catch up" to all of you who were miles ahead of me in
experiencing the area and our mutual history.

Our idea was rather simple,,,to build a backdrop of information for the
visiting researchers,,, to paint a picture of how life was there in those
early years, so you (and we ) could perhaps catch a glimmer into the
soul of those who pioneered the region, then more fully see the whole
picture.

Truth is, in spite of the picture of Talbot, Chattahoochee. Muscogee,
Marion or County we had managed to get onto those pages, we
really have only just begun our delightful journey.

Lea & I were quite willing to search for sources, bear the expense of,
take the time to pore over microfilm, line by line, frame by frame, page
by page. then enter into the computer, then html encode and upload to
rootsweb.

Not a problem, happy to do, pleased to do, because you who were so
honestly and earnestly researching. As far as we were concerned, hey!
we were in this together, helping, sharing, together. And, altogether, as
interested parties, it made far more sense for one or two to do the grunt
work, than for all to mill around, redoubling efforts, getting not much
accomplished as a WHOLE.

In return, you shared your brick walls, your high notes of discovery, and
contributed information that neither we or any other one person could have
ever discovered on their own, even after spending a lifetime exploring.
There are no words to express our appreciation of you and your enormous
efforts and accomplishments singly.

We entered the online frontier with Rootsweb with the understanding that
Rootsweb would do their best to protect our copyright of material, and would
never sell that material.

Then, on June 21, Rootsweb announced their sale to Ancestry.com ,
otherwise known as MyFamily.com. You're probably familiar with
them, they too supply online information, for a price.

All of a sudden we were faced with a tough decision. Believe me,
it is quite one thing to volunteer to supply free information to those
whom you believe are at one with your quite personal "need to know"
intent, and quite another to think there is the slightest possibility that
the information you've worked to supply will be SOLD by someone else.
We have since found 3 other websites on Rootsweb that had "adopted"
either our maps or documents we sought to freely share with you as fellow
researchers, interested in the well-being of the area. They did so without
either our permission or knowledge, without even a acknowledgement and
despite our copyrights. There are probably at least that many more sites
that we know nothing about as yet.

After working for years on the research, I put part of my own
Hammock-McCrary-McBryde family lineage on the page. Now I see
it all over Rootsweb. The only problem with that is, the people who
"lifted" it, didn't do their research, and have since added to and
so mucked it up, as to render it misleading and absolutely
ridiculous, at best. BUT, they've given me credit for their assinine
renderings. Guaranteed to set research back a few years!

You may well think Lea and I are being small, or picky, or are making a
big to-do about nothing in removing our collection of records from the
internet. After all, a goodly portion of what we offered on the pages was
of public record and could be found on your own, if you but had the time,
the interest, could afford the effort or could locate. Could be you're right
in that assumption, and we were but naive to think it would be otherwise.


Carol Johnson

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