Mary Rix has asked me to post the following, as she is unable to post for some reason: I beg to differ with Paul Millington. I set up the Guild Marriage Index to get members to communicate and co-operate with each which was not happening much. As a marriage unites two (or more) families this was set us to facilitate that, not as a "store for members records". It developed with Howard Benbrook's help into a "Marriage Finder" from being randomly able to link a church to a GMI page to defining which pages covered a particular church. Mary Rix (Ex-Guild Marriage Index Co-ordinator)

Mary - I couldn't agree more. That's the exact same reason I pushed for the Worldwide index after I learned that the GMI couldn't really be expanded to encompass the world and still keep all its other functions. A marriage index is a great tool to introduce members to each other. I just wish more would use them. We've got just over 150 thousand marriages in the WorldWide in just one year and I've got another 500+ German marriages to add shortly. So come on folks. The more marriages you contribute - the better your chances of lining up with another member - especially now that Nigel's search will return hits from all the indexes. Every marriage in your database can find a home with either Mary(or her successor) or me. At 2600 members x a midsize estimate of 1000 marriages per member (some people have several smallish studies) - we're looking at 2million plus marrIages. Considering my average contributor has supplied about 3,000 marriages - that number could jump to over 6 million - a very good sized dataset to explore from the mountains of Wales to the mountains of Peru and beyond. Marie (GOONS 5318) Bringing the world together one surname at a time. 'A Pepler Name' http://pepler.tribalpages.com 'Hedgerow - the Ancestors' http://cranberry.tribalpages.com Pepler DNA Study http://www.familytreedna.com/public/pepler-ow/ 'Scroops, Scropes and Scroopes' http://dentonlk.tribalpages.com ________________________________ From: Peter Alefounder via <goons@rootsweb.com> To: goons@rootsweb.com Sent: Friday, January 9, 2015 7:16 AM Subject: Re: [G] Guild Marriage Index Mary Rix has asked me to post the following, as she is unable to post for some reason: I beg to differ with Paul Millington. I set up the Guild Marriage Index to get members to communicate and co-operate with each which was not happening much. As a marriage unites two (or more) families this was set us to facilitate that, not as a "store for members records". It developed with Howard Benbrook's help into a "Marriage Finder" from being randomly able to link a church to a GMI page to defining which pages covered a particular church. Mary Rix (Ex-Guild Marriage Index Co-ordinator) _____________________________________________ RootsWeb lists - surnames, regions, software, etc http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GOONS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message