I feel like a family member has died. I have lived with this project I
believe since it started and will miss working on it. I am glad I have had
the honor of being associated with the Kentucky Vital Projects. I also
have been working on the Family Search indexing program and I encourage
everyone to volunteer. Debbie Coulter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sherry Slaughter" <sheryl.slaughter(a)yahoo.com>
To: <kygenweb-kvrp(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 1:25 PM
Subject: [KYVITALS] Future of the project
Dear volunteers:
Those of you who are newer to the project will not recognize my name, but
I am Sheryl Slaughter, and I started this project in 2003. I worked as the
project coordinator until the untimely death of my husband and a hasty
return to college to get a degree a couple of years ago. I have continued
to work with Sherri Bradley and the other admins as time
permits--particularly in helping with transitions and programming to move
the project between sites. It is with Sherri's blessing that I write to
all of you today.
The project is in a very difficult position. We have moved more than once
to get web space and speed to accommodate the growing project. We recently
were alerted by our current hosting service, BlueHost, that our account
was to be turned off since we have more than 50,000 files. While this
company advertises unlimited size and unlimited bandwith, they have
decided to change their terms of use to exclude sites of more than 50,000
files. At the time of the announcement, we had more than 600,000 files on
the site.
Sherri, the other admins, and myself have been researching options and
discussing what we should do. We have decided to discontinue the project
in its current form. FamilySearch is about to put the entire collection of
Kentucky death certificates from 1911-1955 online, including images and
transcriptions. The estimated timeframe they gave me is 1 to 2 1/2 months.
We are confident that these records will remain free forever, so they meet
the goal of our project to get those up. We are in process of pulling down
all the images except for the two years that are currently being
transcribed.
We plan to leave up the database so researchers will be able to look
through our transcriptions for alternate spellings, etc. that might help
them find their ancestors. We also have a feature where researchers can
see all surname variations in the database, which will be a help for
difficult surnames.
We will be going forward as we can with records that FamilySearch is not
planning to put up. That would include rarer sources such as family
bibles, school censuses, odd lots of records that have not been
microfilmed such as the 1850's birth and death certificates we found in
Campbell County, and other records that show a birth, marriage, or death.
Beyond what records are already in the pipeline, there will be no more
images processed.
Sherri and I are in the middle of downloading and deleting the images from
KyVitals, and uploading them to a KyGenWeb site where county coordinators
or others can link to the individual images. They are being uploaded by
county, and within each county, by year so all the images from the project
will remain available to everyone.
Feel free to ask any questions of Sherri or myself as we work through this
journey trying to transition the project. If you try to access the project
on any day from now forward and cannot, it probably means BlueHost has
shut us off. We are in danger of that every day we are over their 50,000
file limit. If this happens, know that we are working on a resolution and
we will come up with one--even if it takes a few days. Your hard work is
not going away.
As you finish your work on the project, I want to encourage you to
transcribe for FamilySearch if you can. It is easy to do online, and the
work they are accomplishing is nothing short of amazing. Just go to
FamilySearch.org and click on the Indexing tab at the top to sign up and
get started.
I want to personally thank all the volunteers, past and present, for being
willing to sacrifice of yourselves to help realize my dream. I have made
some lifelong friends and gained valuable skills working on this project.
I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
With deepest appreciation,
Sheryl Neal Slaughter
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