Of course an alternative approach to the guild marriage index and the world wide marriage index is to use the guild members' archives which have been available for 10 years and contain over 1.5 million records uploaded by members. There is no need for post holders in the guild to maintain them, each member can choose to make available what they wish and it can be made available to the public or just members - the study owner chooses. And of course for marriages in England and Wales there is the ability for guild members to search across all published members records in one go. Using the template that Marie Byatt developed it is possible to develop a single search of all marriages even though each study name is maintained separately. If the guild chose to include marriages for which there has not been a study owner, these could easily be held in an orphan study and would still be searchable from a single search by guild members. A far better approach in my opinion to the efforts taking place to recreate huge databases of marriages once again. Paul Millington Member No. 2181

Right on --Paul. As you know I've been an advocate for a single marriage index from the word go. The biggest problems I see are 1. Many members don't use the archives or even organize their material to be be archived. This is one of the reasons I 'floated' the Worldwide index idea and continually beg for contributors. Some people seem to respond better when asked to contribute to something specific. I would not be surprised to learn that many members don't really even know how to 'get to' the archives since the new website came in. 2. There is a group that want very discreet data sets without overlaps and don't really seem to grasp the idea of a universal search. I truly feel that the Guild's strength is not in 'how many indexes we can reproduce on the website' but rather in the scholarship and expertise of our members and the data they have correlated into a meaningful study. We can help each other with the riches of this data - a universal search mechanism helps a great deal in doing this. I make sure when someone sends me marriages for the WMI that they know they will be expected to answer queries. Just as Tribal pages only runs their search on the sites that have opted in and Ancestry has it's privacy settings. SO any such search must be optional. Having said all that - the present search results from the homepage are great for luring in possible new members. THey put in their name and see that how many times it occurs in various indexes as well as if a study is already being done. But they can't see the actual index results - have to be a member for that. Here the fact that the results come from 3 or 4 different indexes is actually a plus. 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 ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Millington via <goons@rootsweb.com> To: goons-l@rootsweb.com Cc: Sent: Wednesday, February 4, 2015 2:48 PM Subject: [G] Guild indexes Of course an alternative approach to the guild marriage index and the world wide marriage index is to use the guild members' archives which have been available for 10 years and contain over 1.5 million records uploaded by members. There is no need for post holders in the guild to maintain them, each member can choose to make available what they wish and it can be made available to the public or just members - the study owner chooses. And of course for marriages in England and Wales there is the ability for guild members to search across all published members records in one go. Using the template that Marie Byatt developed it is possible to develop a single search of all marriages even though each study name is maintained separately. If the guild chose to include marriages for which there has not been a study owner, these could easily be held in an orphan study and would still be searchable from a single search by guild members. A far better approach in my opinion to the efforts taking place to recreate huge databases of marriages once again. Paul Millington Member No. 2181 _____________________________________________ 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