Dear Degruy Family Researcher, We have a wonderful announcement to make. Our Degruy web site is up and running! We invite you to take a look. Instructions for how to do this are at the end of this e-mail. Just a few words about our new site. This is a collaboration site and you are invited to participate. We are mainly interested at this phase of uploading original documents. Because we are very concerned about the size of files and the amount of data we can "fit" into this site, we ask you to submit any postings/photos you'd like to add to Celine Degruy Johnson at her e-mail address [ cmj@acsalaska.net ] and let Celine do the actual posting. That way she can keep track of the size of the individual files in relationship to the total space provided on the web site. Please be patient with the uploading. We have many vital records yet to be scanned and uploaded and this takes time. We've been working for over a week and are only 1/3 of the way into the records we have collected so far [and we are getting more and more all the time, thanks to Judy Riffel]. We understand that this isn't a "beautiful" family site [like the Bustanoby site at http://www.bustanobys.com ]. Our web site is more of a "work horse" kind of site. Maybe someday we can have a beautiful site too; but, for now, we are just happy to be able to provide a great amount of primary data -- no small feat, I think. Nor are we yet at the stage of linking individuals into family trees. Again, that is a project further along down the line. But, with all the primary data, we feel confident that when we do reach that point, we will have accurate data to enter. So we continue with taking our "baby steps." Finally, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Celine [hip hip hooray! trumpets! fanfare!]. She is the one who got our web site up and running. She has been working daily for weeks on this. We also want to give a "thumbs up!" to Bonnie Bess Wood who is our "official genealogy library angel." Bonnie is devising "professional" ways to label our files and organize our data. We look forward to having you join us in this collaborative project. Instructions for joining follow below. If you have trouble, send Celine or me an e-mail and we'll try to help. Once you log on, browse the site, take the Online Tour [under Utilities], consider making a contribution of your own! Welcome! Renée Degruylist administrator --------------------------- THE DEGRUY FAMILY COLLABORATION WEB SITE AT MYFAMILY.COM Log In Instructions: Link to: http://degruy.myfamily.com At the login prompt, enter: degruyguest At the password line, enter: verloin You can continue as a guest, but, if after browsing the site, you want to "register" formally, click the link to send an e-mail to the Administrator with their name and e-mail address and we can send you your own userid. [A word of caution: although this is a "private" site {we haven't gone "public," although we may make an announcement on LAORLEAN and other mailing lists}, we still caution about privacy issues. For example, in the Address Book, you might want to list your name and state and email address, but you might think twice about putting your actual home address or telephone number on the web. This is up to you, of course, but many of us are concerned with privacy, spamming, identity theft issues and we feel it important to point this out for your consideration. People can always email you and you can respond privately with your more personal information.]