NYMONROE-L Archives

Archiver > NYMONROE > 2006-07 > 1153109102


From: "Dick Halsey" <>
Subject: Anniversary
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 00:05:27 -0400


I waited until after midnight to post this. Monday, July 17th is
the tenth anniversary of the GenWeb of Monroe County. In March of 1996 a
group of people in Kentucky got the idea to set up a genealogy website
for each county. The idea caught on fire and by July 1996 people were
asking for volunteers for NY counties. I was doing the Rochester
Genealogical Society web pages at the time so the lady that was the NY
State GenWeb coordinator asked if I would do the Monroe County GenWeb. I
wasn't the first person to volunteer in NY State but I was the first to
have GenWeb site up in New York State. At first it was just a few web
pages.

The original site was on Vivanet, a local Rochester internet
provider. The cemetery records were in text format, not web pages. I
started to run out of space by 2000 and then Vivanet abruptly closed
down. I moved to website to RootsWeb in Nov. 2000. RootsWeb dates back
to early 1996. It was founded by Brian Leverich and Karen Isaacson.
Their intention was to make RootsWeb a non-profit organization. That
never happened. Instead, in June 2000, RootsWeb was sold to My
Family.com with the stipulation that space for RootsWeb be made
available for free. MyFamily owns not only RootsWeb but also, Ancestry,
Genealogy.com and FamilyTreeMaker.com. They have stuck to their
agreement and there are no ads on the GenWeb pages. The only time you
will see ads is when you do a search. Those come from Picosearch, the
program/website that I use as a search program.

Originally I had a message area that I had to manually paste
each message onto a web page. That was a pain to maintain. I started
making use of the message board on RootsWeb and ended up moving the
messages back to 1996 to that message board. I noticed that just last
week, Monday, was posted the 10,000th message.

I began adding postcards and other pictures in Jan. 2003. There
are now approx. 550 pictures. I know that technically they don't have
anything to do with genealogy but they do show you what the area was
like in the past.

This list started on April 17, 1999. I sent out messages
announcing the list to people and within 10 minutes Cathy C. was the
first to sign up. I think there were about 20 people that signed up the
first day. Now there are 365 people on this list. I was afraid that the
list would take up a lot of my time to maintain. I was wrong! I see that
I was wrong in part because of so many of you respond to messages much
quicker than I ever could. Plus there were only 2 abuses in the last ten
years. That is because the messages are all text messages. The server
bounces any messages sent to it that are not subscribers or are in not
in text format. Did you know that all the messages are archived? You can
view all messages from the page at:
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/nymonroe. Notice that there are 4
messages from before the list began. That is because it takes the date
on the sender's computer and people had the wrong date on their
computer. There is also a search page at:
http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl?list=NYMONROE At
first the message board and the list were totally separate. Then someone
showed me how to have the message board send new postings to the list.
So over the years there been a little over 15,000 list message.

So currently on the GenWeb of Monroe County there are about 700
web pages for about 300 megabytes total of the whole web site. There are
still things that I can add. I still have other biographies to scan plus
I still have more veteran's records for Holy Sepulchre and Mt. Hope. And
more old postcards and pictures.

Finally, I have an anniversary gift for you. I have a new
sub-section: on-line books. It is at:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~nymonroe/book/index.htm So far, there are only
two books, both by Arch Merrill. I found out that the copyright had run
out on these books. On-line is Arch's first book; "A River Ramble,"
which chronicles his trek up the Genesee River from the source in
Pennsylvania to where it empties into Lake Ontario. Also on-line is
Arch's fifth book "Rochester Sketchbook" about interesting citizens of
Rochester. I cut the books into a few web pages each including all the
pictures. I hope you will enjoy reading them. I sure did!

Dick


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