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Archiver > IAFAYETT > 2001-06 > 0993704364


From: Linnie Howell <>
Subject: Former GenConnect Boards
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 00:01:23 -0500


Hello all,

As many of you have no doubt discovered, the GenConnect boards as we
knew them no longer exist. I am very sorry to have to report that all
posts to those boards, whether obits, bios, etc., have been moved to
boards at Ancestry.com. Actuall, all the posts to the GenConnect boards
have been lumped into one board at Ancestry/My Family.com. This happened
last week. Today is the first day I have even been able to view any of
the boards. I have not yet been able to "adopt" my own boards. Besides
the three USGenWeb project counties, I had submitted sponsor fees to
have boards for several surnames I am researching. Well, all that is
down the tubes. I DO NOT like the format of the new board; I do not like
the fact that Ancestry has shoved this down the throat of county
coordinators; however, Ancestry did purchase Rootsweb some time back and
can do whatever they wish with posts made to the old GenConnect boards.
It worked great for awhile didn't it?

I finally did get in to at least look at some of the boards tonight. In
order to do so, I had to enable java script and change my browser to
accept all cookies!

One of the main purposes of this rather lengthy email is ask those of
you have contributed so many biographies, obituaries, wills, etc.,
whether you saved any of those on your hard drive or on a floppy disk?
If so, I would appreciate it very much if you would forward copies to
me. I intend to do everything I can to recover the hundreds of posts
that you folks contributed and post them back to the county site itself.

This is all very confusing to me and I'm sure it is to you. Last week I
thought I would just resign all my counties and let the devil do what he
wanted. But - if I do that, I will be pulling down from the internet any
information that I have typed in and uploaded. All that would do is
further hinder researchers from finding any help in their research.

This is all VERY distressing to me. I've worked on this project for four
years. I probably will be looking for new housing for Polk, Fayette, and
Haskell county sites. I do NOT trust Ancestry/My Family.com - I suspect
that sooner or later the information on these sites will become a "for
fee" visit.

It is up to you, the volunteers, to decide how you will continue, if you
do continue, to post obits, bios, etc.

In the future, I will not be posting anything to the board at
Ancestry/My Family.com. Obits, queries, bios, etc., will once again be
on the county site. It won't be as neat as the GenConnect boards where
you could search a lot of different things at once. But, at least it
will still be free and it will remain under my control. If you decide to
contribute obits, bios, etc. directly to the county site, send them to
me in an email and I will post them directly to the site.

I wish I could tell you more about what's going on but that's all I
know. I've not been able to "re-adopt" the boards as yet and am not
certain I want to. I've spent several years moving queries from the bio
board to the query board, etc., - and now the powers that be have
decided to put them all on one board.

Thanks for all your help and support in making our county sites among
the best in the nation; all three are award winners and we just need to
do what we can to continue to make them better. I'm pretty darned
determined to do it without the alleged assistance of Ancestry.com.

Thanks to those of you who have persevered and read this message all the
way to the end.

Linnie
http://www.rootsweb.com/~arpolk
http://www.rootsweb.com/~iafayett
http://www.rootsweb.com/~okhaskel
http://linnie.rootsweb.com

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