----- Original Message -----
From: "Rosanne" <rosanne(a)curiousfox.com>
To: <tots(a)moranbah.net.au>
Sent: Tuesday 09 2002 6:51 AM
Subject: CARWARDINE Mary family history
Hello
My new site Curious Fox may be of interest to you in researching your
CARWARDINE Mary family history.
http://www.curiousfox.com/
Curious Fox is a gazetteer of 50,000 UK villages, towns and counties for
making contacts regarding family and local history. You can search the site
by village, town, county or surname and add free entries asking for help or
sharing what you know.
Although the site has only just opened the idea of linking genealogy to
local history and villages is working really well and people are already
discovering new family connections and breaking down brickwalls. It should
work really well for more common surnames or finding family houses,
employers and businesses. It would be great if everybody just shared old
photos of school and village events. Yesterday a Canadian user discovered an
1890's photo of her great grandfather with a life boat crew , the lady
didn't even know he'd been a lifeboatman let alone won a medal for a
difficult rescue! We hope to become the first port of call to swap or trade
such items, and to find short run local history books that are usually only
available in local shops.
Everybody can post entries, free users with red mailboxes and paid members
with green mailboxes. Anybody can send messages to green mailboxes but only
paid members can send messages to red mailboxes. The system has been
designed so that anybody offering help or with just a passing interest does
not need to pay a penny but anybody who wants help or is an enthusiast can
join to get green mailboxes. No email addresses appear on the site at all
so it should be spam proof.
You control all your own entries and can add, edit and delete at will. Paid
members can also add a profile, show a link to a family or local history
site and receive email alerts if any new entries are added to their
villages. Full membership costs £5 or $8 but there is no pressure to pay,
free users are really welcome as we are sure it will all balance out in the
end. Fingers crossed! All we ask is that you make some interesting
entries. In our first few weeks we have had some really good contacts
made. - where people didn't even know a branch existed or had been searching
for years with no luck.
There are no ads or affiliate links. Reasonable commercial use is welcome
providing people stay on topic - books, maps, pics, research services etc.
We've been open 7 weeks and hardly show on the search engines yet so it's
still early days but we already have about 2500 free members and about 3,500
entries. Most users arrived because of really good reviews on genealogy
newsletters. Searching the site it still looks rather empty but 50,000
village pages take an awful lot of filling. To get more of an idea on how
the site is building, click the "All County" link on a village page.
With any luck the whole site will start snowballing over the next couple of
months.
The most important thing for us at the moment is to get people adding lots
of interesting entries and recommending us. So if you do think the site is
good and has potential, please do help by adding some entries, telling other
people about the site and linking to us.
thanks
Rosanne Sharp
--
http://www.curiousfox.com
Curious Fox - The UK Gazetteer for Family and Local History