- Curious Fox Despite the somewhat unrelated name, Curious Fox is a new Web site of interest to both genealogists researching ancestry in the U.K. and to historians. I took a look at the site this week and must say that I was impressed. This site is rather different from most other genealogy sites. While it does contain local and family history, the Web site focuses on place names. All genealogy information is associated with a location. Historical information about each place name is available, with most of the data provided by users. Curious Fox is based upon a gazetteer of 50,000 UK villages, towns, and counties. You can search for the village name, generate lists of nearby villages and hamlets, and link to the exact location on a modern map or an old map. Each village/town/county has a page where you can leave genealogy and local history contact messages. You can also search by family name. The site has been set up by a husband and wife team based in Whixall, Shropshire, UK. The Web site has a rather unusual financial arrangement: you can either pay or not. The owners request that you pay a modest fee of £5 (about $7.50 in U.S. funds), but they do not require payment before you are allowed to view the data. However, paid members receive more privileges than free members. Curious Fox does not carry any banners or any other form of advertising for other businesses. The advantage of this system is that anybody being helpful doesn't have to pay a penny, but anybody wanting help can encourage responses by choosing to pay. It is completely up to the user whether to pay or not. However, at least one side in any message transaction has to be a paid member. The free membership lasts as long as the user wishes. The site has a "red box / green box system. Free members have red mailboxes. Only paid members can contact them. That is, free members cannot contact free members. However, free members are able to contact paid members, and paid members may contact free members. Paid members have green mailboxes. Both free members and paid members may send messages to green mailboxes. The advantage to paid members is that it is very easy for free members to contact them, and they are far more likely to receive messages as a result. There are several other benefits of £5 membership. For instance, all members can store a list of villages for easy access; however, only paid members will receive an e-mail whenever a new entry is added for one of their stored villages. Another advantage to be added soon: all members will soon be able to add URLs to link to other Web sites. However, a red URL (posted by a free member) will only work for paid members. A green URL (posted by a paid member) will work for everyone. Everyone can search the Curious Fox site by surname. The surname search only finds true surnames. That is, a search for the name Teacher will not find entries that refer to the occupation of teacher. You can access Curious Fox right now at: <A HREF="http://www.curiousfox.com/">http://www.curiousfox.com</A>.