Great ideas, thanks.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Angela Cassidy" <angela_b_cassidy(a)yahoo.com>
To: <flgen(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 3:06 PM
Subject: [FLGEN] How I got my volunteers for Gadsden County
"L.L. Scott" <llscott2000(a)bellsouth.net> wrote:
How do you obtain your wonderful volunteers?
I did contact a couple of groups in Monroe, but never a reply.
I posted a request on the Gadsden Rootsweb List asking everyone to send
me biographies of their ancestors that they could write from their own
research, to send me the obituaries of their ancestors that they have been
saving, as well as photos of their ancestors. I asked for old photos of
the towns in the county showing buildings and photos of school, community,
and church events with people in them. I asked for family Bible pages,
school diplomas, political mementos, and family trees.
I also told of my plans for the coming year and said I needed volunteers
to survey cemeteries, photograph cemetery tombstones, type handwritten
wills and deeds and scanned obituaries for me at home, take the large
cemeteries done in row order and type an alphabetical list for me so
people don't have to search through over 500 names by row order, and asked
for volunteers to transcribe probate and marriage records from the
courthouse or state archives. People responded with offers to do all of
that, and photographs, newspaper excerpts, obituaries, and biographies
have started flowing in. One lady in Jacksonville and another in
Virginia, with roots here, are typing at home for me. One lady is
surveying cemeteries, and another is helping me photograph tombstones.
Another lady is transcribing marriage records that were copied from the
courthouse books. Another is sending me excerpts from old newspapers.
I also contacted several people in the local historical society, of which
I am a member, and asked for their help, as well as my genealogy
relatives, because I know they have a storehouse of information. I am
talking to church secretaries who have the old church records and will
share them with me. So now I have a group of worker bees. They all feel
like they are contributing toward making the Gadsden GenWeb page much more
informative, but in a way that suits their capabilities and their time
schedules. My only deadline is when we all get too senile to do this
anymore.
The next thing I am going to do is write an article for each of the
newspapers (our county has only small towns, and the newspapers will print
anything to fill up the paper), explaining what GenWeb is, describing the
Gadsden GenWeb page, and soliciting copies of all of the things I
mentioned above, especially ancestor photos. I hope to be inundated. I
have the advantage of being related to about half of the people in the
county, so name recognition alone will get me a lot of information.
I don't have suggestions for those of you who live out-of-county and who
are in metropolitan areas--you won't have the one-to-one relationships
that I have, but you still may get some people on your county Rootsweb
List to help you. Just be very specific about what you ask for because
people cannot imagine they would have anything we want and won't offer
unless you get very specific, like asking for pictures of their
grandparents and obituaries of their relatives that they have been saving,
or photographs of family Bible pages. Then they say, "Oh, I have that, I
could share that."
Good luck.
Angela