Debi wrote,
Derick,
You've lost me on this email of yours.
It seems to me you're comparing a server (
USGW.ORG) with a genealogy project
(USGenWeb) and you don't think it's right for anyone to be involved in both.
Is this what you saying? Call me dense but I don't quite get what's wrong
with volunteering for with both. One of our long standing Advisory Board
members has worked for RootsWeb for quite a long time and I don't see a fuss
being made about that.
I don't have a problem at all with people being in more than one
project. However, after taking a look at John Rigdon's campaign page
and the links that Derick mentioned, I have some serious concerns
about his candidacy.
Except for the initials USGW that bear some resemblance to USGenWeb,
there is next to nothing on his pages that features the USGenWeb
project, and the
USGW.org home page itself implies that it is more
than just a server:
USGW.ORG is a not for profit organization dedicated to providing
genealogy and history materials on the internet.
The primary project featured is "United History and Genealogy Network" at
http://www.usgw.org/uhgn/index.htm
which is, like USGenWeb, a national-level project with pages for
every state and county, or so you would assume from the home page.
Maybe some states actually have pages with some content, but
virtually all that's there for North Carolina is a list of the county
names. None have been adopted, no information is presented.
The URL, if you want to look for yourself, is
http://www.usgw.org/uhgn/nc/
Clicking on the link "About North Carolina" gives you the following
information:
Bird: Cardinal
Border States: Georgia South Carolina Tennessee Virginia
Flag: [image of state flag]
Flower: Dogwood
Motto: To be, rather than to seem
Nickname: Old North State / Tar Heel State
Song: The Old North State
Clicking the "History" link gives you the following:
North Carolina was inhabited by a number of native tribes sharing
some cultural traits, but also distinguished by regional and
linguistic variations.
Three major language families were represented in North Carolina:
Iroquoian, Siouan, and Algonquian.
The first permanent English settlers in North Carolina were
immigrants from the tidewater area of southeastern Virginia. These
first of these
"overflow" settlers moved into the Albemarle area of northeast North
Carolina around 1650.
North Carolina, on April 12, 1776, authorized her delegates to the
Continental Congress to vote for independence. on November 21, 1789,
the state
adopted the constitution, becoming the twelfth state to enter the union.
In 1790, North Carolina ceded her western lands which included
Washington, Davidson, Hawkins, Greene, Sullivan, Sumner, and
Tennessee counties,
to the federal government. Between 1790 and 1796 the territory was
known as Tennessee Territory, but in 1796 it became simply
Tennessee, the
sixteenth state in the Union.
North Carolina was readmitted to the Union in 1868. Serving as
president during much of the difficult period of Reconstruction was
Andrew Johnson,
the seventeenth president (1865-1869), another North Carolina native.
This conveys very little useful information for genealogists, and is
even misleading on several points.
Not only that, the text seems to have been cribbed from other sources
without attribution.
-----
I have no objection to the creation of other genealogy projects that
more or less parallel USGenWeb. We don't have any exclusive right to
genealogical information on the web, and to my mind, the important
thing is the information presented. On-line genealogy shouldn't be a
competitive pursuit. If John Rigdon wants to work for or sponsor
another project, I have no objection.
However, I'm troubled that someone who is running for our top office
has on his own web pages, linked to his own campaign pages, given so
little attention to USGenWeb.
USGenWeb isn't mentioned on the
USGW.org home page, despite the name
of this domain which by its initials suggests some kind of
association. Following the link to "sites we host" for
USGW.org gets
you
The USGenWeb Project State Sites
The USGenWeb Project is dedicated to providing free
information on line for genealogical research. It is organized along
geographic lines with a
site for each state, then below that for each county, and in
some cases, separate sites for each city.
[following this link reveals that only one state page, Oregon, is
housed on his server; a general link to "other states" then takes you
to the USGenWeb home page.]
and then we have
The USGenWeb Project County Sites
These are the individual County sites which we host. With
3,200 counties in the US, there are a LOT of others not hosted by
USGW, but we
are proud of the great job done by the volunteers here.
[this link brings up some html text that doesn't display as a web
page on my browser.]
Before looking at this site, I had not made any decision about whom
to vote for in the national coordinator election. I've had some
brief past dealings with John Rigdon, and I have no complaints
against him based on this past experience. I looked at his site
today because of Derick's message, and Debi's response. After
seeing it, however, I am not convinced that he has the best interests
of USGenWeb at heart.
--
Elizabeth Harris
ncgen(a)mindspring.com
NCGenWeb project:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncgenweb/
Winston-Salem NC area genealogy:
http://www.fmoran.com/