Re: Major Changes to Ellis Island Search and Save Capabilities I have just read some very disturbing news about changes at the Ellis Island site. The Save function for the manifests have been disabled and Steve Morse's site which gave us some tremendous search options has been shut down due to a threat of a lawsuit. I checked out the sites and found that this was true. I have some comments on both issues. First, the ability to save the manifest allowed researchers to enlarge the copy and read the small notations. It is impossible to read much of the manifest as it appears online even in it's largest form. Without reading where and who the person lived with before they immigrated or the person and final destination of the ancestor it is often not possible to verify that we have the correct manifest. Why would we consider paying $25 US ($37 Cdn + $5 for a US Bank Draft) for one page of this document without even knowing if it pertains to our heritage. Also the printed copy is not always as clear as it's digital counterpart which can be enlarged to 2-3-4 or even 500 times it's original size. Second threatening Steve Morse with a lawsuit if he doesn't close his site sounds like bad business practice to me. Steve has helped many researchers find their ancestors when the search engine on the Ellis Island site failed. Does The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation want us to find the manifests or not? Would it not be a wiser move to hire Steve Morse and use his expertise to set up an online search engine that works well instead of taking away our only search engine that will find some of our manifests? Without Steve's site fewer manifests will be found and if the SLEIF is looking for money from people ordering the manifests then how many orders will they loose if the manifests can't be found? Is this good business practice? A Newsletter concerning the lawsuit is at the end of this e-mail. I feel this is a sad day for Genealogy. The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. (SLEIF) raised huge amounts of money for the Ellis Island site and used volunteers to do the work. Over 12,000 volunteers from the LDS and many others either for personal reasons or as part of other organizations decided to donate their precious time and money. Now that people are using the site the SLEIF has changed the original policies which may have been instrumental in getting many of the donations. The LDS who I gather may have been their biggest or one of their biggest contributers provides us all with genealogical data at reasonable rates. I wonder if they are feeling good about what is happening now. Reasonable rates are not what I am finding on this site. If your interested in reading more about the volunteers you can go to google and do a search on: Volunteers "Ellis Island" I wonder how many people who donated time and money in the past and would have donated in the future will be rethinking their decision. Futhermore this will probably make it harder for other genealogical organizations to get donations and volunteers for things on the internet. Those of us who volunteer may come to believe that things will change for the worse as soon as the donations are gathered. Is that not what we are being told by these changes? If you want to voice your opinion on these changes I suggest you send an e-mail or letter to The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. [email protected] Or write: The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. Attention: History Center 292 Madison Ave New York, NY 10017 If anyone gets an answer I hope you will post it since many have said that they have not received answers to their questions in the past. =========More about threat of lawsuit================= From: Nu? What's New? News About Jewish Genealogy from Avotaynu Vol. 3, No. 16 - September 2, 2002 SPECIAL EDITION Gary Mokotoff, Editor Steve Morse "One-Step" Site Forced to Shut Down ======================================= Under the threat of legal action from The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. (SLEIF), Stephen Morse has shut down all of his sites that link to the Ellis Island Database. The Foundation accused Morse of creating a site that performs what has come to be known as "deep linking." Deep linking is the act of linking to a page at a web site other than the Home Page. Deep linking may, indeed, be illegal. In a court case brought in a country of the European Union, it was deemed illegal and, therefore, cannot be performed in any country of the EU. In the United States, a Georgia state law that banned deep linking was ruled unconstitutional only because it overstepped the boundaries of Georgia law which has to be limited to events which occur within the state. A number of years ago, Ticketmaster, a U.S. company that sells tickets to events, sued Microsoft, who was providing deep links to the Ticketmaster site. The case was settled out of court with Microsoft agreeing not to continue the practice. Morse and SLEIF actually came close to an agreement which would allow portions of his site to remain available until they provided comparable service, but the contract they presented him to sign demanded that he admit that what he did was "in violation of the Foundation's legal rights and in breach of the Foundation's terms and conditions...." The contract then stated SLEIF would forgive him for past sins. Morse refused to agree to such terms and decided instead to close his site. Deep linking is a common practice. Every search engine performs the function. Every edition of "Nu? What's New?" includes such links. Web site owners normally do not object to the practice because it has a positive benefit to the site owner. However, this does not mean they cannot reserve the right to request that such a practice be selectively banned. Additional information about this controversy can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/cyber/cyberlaw/07law.ht ml, which, of course, is a deep link into The New York Times web site. ======End of Newsletter Editorial ==========

One further consideration I plan to point out in my letter of outrage to Ellis Island-Statue of Liberty Foundation is that using the search mechanism they have on their page takes a huge amount of on-line time. Checking each possible spelling only two at a time, entering the dates, entering the age-range, entering the ship's name, all separately, keeps each user "attached" to their site for much longer than when using Steve Morse's all-in-one search. This can easily cause site crashes because more people will be on at the same time. This does not seem like a plus for them in my book! Joy Weaver

> I have just read some very disturbing news about changes at the Ellis > Island site. The Save function for the manifests have been disabled > and Steve Morse's site which gave us some tremendous search > options has been shut down due to a threat of a lawsuit. I checked > out the sites and found that this was true. In a discussion about this on another mailing list, Cyndi Howells (of Cyndi's List) referred interested researchers to a discussion on the Council of Genealogy Columnists list: <http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/CGC/2002-09> Bob Sullivan <[email protected]> Schenectady County Public Library (NY) <http://www.scpl.org/> Schenectady Digital History Archive <http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/>