Hi Listers, PLEASE READ THIS!!!!! To answer a couple of your questions, I am not the administrator of the Caldwell or Lyon Counties, Rootsweb/Ancestry pages. Vicki Stewart is the administrator of these pages. I have been posting obits to the Caldwell-Lyon pages for a year. This as you can imagine takes a lot of my volunteer time. I, as some of you have, gained a lot of valuable extended family information from these obits. Rootsweb has up until now been a free service, but with Ancestry.com as myfamily.com buying them, and now you have to register to place anything on these pages, I have the feeling they are going to eventually start charging for everything. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" I have spent over 2 hours this morning reading complaints on the Ancestry.com administrative message board. These concerns about the changeover and the services and also copyright concerns over the free service (Rootsweb) and a for profit entity (Ancestry. com), are troubling, not only for me, but for lots of other posters. Until Ancestry publishes their stand on some of these problems I will be reluctant to continue putting Obits on the list. I apoligize for the problems this may cause anyone, but until the problems are resolved with Ancestry and Rootsweb, I choose not to enter any more obits unless they are prior to 1923. One problem of my posting is Ancestry is listing me as "AUTHOR" of these obits. I am NOT the author of these obits. We will just have to set back and let all this "shake" out!!! Later Ken G. \\\|/// \\ ~ ~ // ( @ @ ) ----oOOo-(_)-oOOo----McGillekehr ********************************************************************** *****Your kygenweb homepages are***** CALDWELL http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/caldwell.html LYON http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/lyon.html **********************************************************************

Thank you for your post Ken - I'd also like to announce that Trigg County has a new query board that will be easy to find and easy to handle. It will be housed on my server and be managed by Trigg County itself. Trigg will continue to have a link to the Message Boards but we will have our 'personal' touch of county queries. I have not decided what I will do with the Sellers obituaries as yet. Most of them can be viewed on the Christian County Obituary page but you cannot add to them unless you post to me. There is a possibility that I will start a Trigg County Obituary Page... housed on my server.. Hope everyone understand's... I know GenConnect/RW/ and Ancestry.com feel they have done the right thing. However the UsGenWeb Home Pages are not required to use their server or use their boards. We are required to have a query page/board and we can put any up that we desire. Thank you for your time. ----- Original Message ----- From: Kenneth E. Gilkey <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 12:27 PM Subject: OBITS > Hi Listers, > > PLEASE READ THIS!!!!! > > To answer a couple of your questions, I am not the administrator of > the Caldwell or Lyon Counties, Rootsweb/Ancestry pages. Vicki > Stewart is the administrator of these pages. I have been posting > obits to the Caldwell-Lyon pages for a year. This as you can imagine > takes a lot of my volunteer time. > > I, as some of you have, gained a lot of valuable extended family > information from these obits. > > Rootsweb has up until now been a free service, but with Ancestry.com > as myfamily.com buying them, and now you have to register to place > anything on these pages, I have the feeling they are going to > eventually start charging for everything. > > "There is no such thing as a free lunch" > > I have spent over 2 hours this morning reading complaints on the > Ancestry.com administrative message board. These concerns about the > changeover and the services and also copyright concerns over the free > service (Rootsweb) and a for profit entity (Ancestry. com), are > troubling, not only for me, but for lots of other posters. > > Until Ancestry publishes their stand on some of these problems I will > be reluctant to continue putting Obits on the list. > > I apoligize for the problems this may cause anyone, but until the > problems are resolved with Ancestry and Rootsweb, I choose not to > enter any more obits unless they are prior to 1923. One problem of my > posting is Ancestry is listing me as "AUTHOR" of these obits. I am > NOT the author of these obits. > > We will just have to set back and let all this "shake" out!!! > > Later > Ken G. > > \\\|/// > \\ ~ ~ // > ( @ @ ) > ----oOOo-(_)-oOOo----McGillekehr > ********************************************************************** > > *****Your kygenweb homepages are***** > > CALDWELL http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/caldwell.html > > LYON http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/lyon.html > > ********************************************************************** > > > > ==== KYCALDWE Mailing List ==== > Don't hesitate, participate! > > ============================== > Visit Ancestry's Library - The best collection of family history > learning and how-to articles on the Internet. > http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library

If I may be so bold as to say something here... I am not bragging here, but stating facts... I am one of the folks that helped to start KyGenWeb; I am state coordinator for Ky and have been since Aug 1996 when Jeff stepped down; I have the Hopkins Co website, and am one of the 2 people who started GenConnect 4+ years ago. I set up the first orphan county websites in USGenWeb in 1996. I was the first state coordinator for Colorado and Kansas [am still listed as asst in Ks], and the first state coordinator for all 3 states for the Archives. There are few people who have been as involved with USGenWeb as I have been for as long as I have been. I am also on staff at RootsWeb/Ancestry. [The person in charge at RootsWeb, Jake Gehring, is also a county coordinator in another state. ;-) ] One of the most requested tools that has been asked for over the past 4+ years by GenConnect users and admins alike was a way to easily see what they have posted and where and EASILY update their addy themselves. With the new boards this is now all available. It is only possible however with a central database to hold the addys used to post. This database contains only your username and addy... no other identifying information is asked for. This username can be anything you want it to be... it doesn't have to be your own name. It does have to be a valid email address. This is completely seperate from any Ancestry subscription username etc. I have an Ancestry subscription. I also have several other usernames set up to use for my boards I admin and those that I don't. Boards for other types of data... census, marriages, etc have been requested by you since the beginning of GenConnect. While all the boards have been combined into 1 board now, the drop down list has added several new classifications for messages, both for posting and easy searching. You [users and admins] have requested that one other classification also be added - queries - so that only queries can be included in a search, and this is being considered and I think is going to be implemented soon. One of the other things that we [GenConnect] wanted to do was to make it difficult for the spammers to harvest the email addys of our posters, and we have done that as well. RootsWeb promised 5+ years ago that anything we placed on their server would be available free to the public. Nothing has changed in that regard. Ancestry's position is that anything they receive for free is given for free. I don't see that they have done anything to change that. Read this for yourself on their website: http://www.myfamilyinc.com/about_us/copyright.htm That page is linked to on every single board. I honestly don't know how it can be stated any plainer than what they have said on that page. As with any new program there are some bugs and staff is working hard to get them fixed. Ken said: One problem of my posting is Ancestry is listing me as "AUTHOR" of these obits. I am NOT the author of these obits. The "AUTHOR" is the person that posted the message. We know there is a bug in the software that is not showing this correctly in some cases and it is on our list of things to fix. It is not as important an issue however as some of the other bugs.. but it will get fixed soon. ;-) Staff has also asked for a way for you to post the obits etc without the message having a link to your name/addy and I believe that is also going to be implemented, but it might be a few weeks or so. Betty is also correct in that county coordinators are free to use whatever system they want to use for their county queries and data and as state coordinator for KyGenWeb, I stand behind her in her decision to use her own system, just as Pat Oliver has done for his counties since the very beginning. I hope this answers some of the questions and concerns. None of us like change, but change is inevitable. ;-) Some of our Ky counties have seen 5 or 6 county coordinators over the past 5 years [I have personally seen your queries on several websites completely disappear when the coordinator left and took everything with them], and some, like most of the counties in Western Ky, including Caldwell [any my own county - Hopkins], have had only 1 extremely dedicated coordinator. Post your queries on whatever system is set up for each county and on the new message boards, for maximum exposure... and rest assured that your queries and data won't be sold just because it happens to be on RootsWeb. And give the new boards a chance folks... I really think you will like them once you learn your way around. At this point things are new, and staff is busy moving things around to get boards from 3 different systems merged into 1. ;-) Best, nt -----Original Message----- From: Kenneth E. Gilkey [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 11:28 AM To: [email protected] Subject: OBITS Hi Listers, PLEASE READ THIS!!!!! To answer a couple of your questions, I am not the administrator of the Caldwell or Lyon Counties, Rootsweb/Ancestry pages. Vicki Stewart is the administrator of these pages. I have been posting obits to the Caldwell-Lyon pages for a year. This as you can imagine takes a lot of my volunteer time. I, as some of you have, gained a lot of valuable extended family information from these obits. Rootsweb has up until now been a free service, but with Ancestry.com as myfamily.com buying them, and now you have to register to place anything on these pages, I have the feeling they are going to eventually start charging for everything. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" I have spent over 2 hours this morning reading complaints on the Ancestry.com administrative message board. These concerns about the changeover and the services and also copyright concerns over the free service (Rootsweb) and a for profit entity (Ancestry. com), are troubling, not only for me, but for lots of other posters. Until Ancestry publishes their stand on some of these problems I will be reluctant to continue putting Obits on the list. I apoligize for the problems this may cause anyone, but until the problems are resolved with Ancestry and Rootsweb, I choose not to enter any more obits unless they are prior to 1923. One problem of my posting is Ancestry is listing me as "AUTHOR" of these obits. I am NOT the author of these obits. We will just have to set back and let all this "shake" out!!! Later Ken G. \\\|/// \\ ~ ~ // ( @ @ ) ----oOOo-(_)-oOOo----McGillekehr ********************************************************************** *****Your kygenweb homepages are***** CALDWELL http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/caldwell.html LYON http://home.hiwaay.net/~woliver/lyon.html ********************************************************************** ==== KYCALDWE Mailing List ==== Don't hesitate, participate! ============================== Visit Ancestry's Library - The best collection of family history learning and how-to articles on the Internet. http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library