Donald, Several good ideas to answer your question below have been given through the TURNER Mailing List. I'll add a couple more. Don't forget that RootsWeb's WorldConnect Project website (which is also cloned by Ancestry.com's Family Trees website, I think they still call it) has been advancing the availability of TURNER data to researchers worldwide for years now. It's free, easy to set up, easy to update, etc. Yes, eventually someone will die or quit updating it for one reason or another, and then the data won't continue to improve as it did in the past. Books do the same thing: once they're published, mostly they don't become "new and improved" over time; but they still have great value for what they are. Same thing with the websites. And yes, there are many problems about the information's accuracy because much of what's out there is speculative. Even the best original documents can have errors. I look at it this way: I've done the best I can at the moment with what I have; I don't claim to have done any better than that; I then have laid out my good, not so good, and who-knows-whether-it's-very-good-or-not clues for anyone to toss around themselves, so that we can maybe get some new ideas of how to proceed--such as if I had taken my paper notes to a conference, laid them out on a table for researchers with the same basic goals as mine, and said, "What do you think of all this? Any suggestions?" More people than I can remember have been glad the website has been there because it's a compilation of many, many people's work over a long period of time. I cite my sources--there are still a few pages of my earliest work there that need some tweaking in this--in accordance with standards that are acceptable in the genealogical world since cyber sharing of information made it imperative that we learn a way to do citations for these purposes in an organized fashion. For all the many wonderful and helpful researchers who've been glad to see what I have-- some who have posted Post-em's at some of the webpages (showing more data than I'd previously known)--there will be one or two with negative comments that I've stopped trying to reason around. It's a futile effort most of the time. So I try to focus on my purposes for doing the research and let it be available to whoever can use it. Hopefully they'll use it properly, just as one would hope when publishing hardcopy = books. The other idea is to offer a copy of your hardcopies to BYU's Family History collection because your books will be scanned (I believe that's how they're managing this project) online, searchable word for word, which will then allow us at our home computers to read what's there no matter where in the world one lives. There are thousands of these already available and more every month. They've been working on this for some time now, entering in all the family histories that used to be shelved altogether at Salt Lake's Family History Library. I can't imagine a greater way to reach a wider audience, which is a big part of my purpose. If I can reach the cousins many times beyond the immediate family--the ones who actually received just the records nobody closer to me has--it just could be that they will be willing to correct what I don't know or lines I have gotten mixed up through best-guess conclusions that don't work too well but seemed to be pretty much on the right track, or to add information to what's already there that *is* correct. There is a great deal of argument about the efficacy of this approach. I don't want to extend the argument further except to suggest it isn't a good approach. What IS helpful are the efforts of kind-hearted people who work together to achieve something we cannot possibly do all on our own. We've all benefited from somebody else's work, obviously, whether it was the original document recorder or someone else. We can thank each other and our ancestors for all of it. In the end, what your decision is regarding how you give your information away depends on who you want to give it to, how long you want to work on it anyway, how extensive you care to record extended family lines, etc.--in other words, what your objectives are. When you decide those things, you can determine what to do to enable you to meet your own goals. There is not just any one way to go about genealogical research. In these days of the World Wide Web and computer technology to keep it all in order and easily searchable, we have room for our own brands of encyclopedic knowledge to share in ways never before imagined. Enjoy whatever you choose to do. You'll find your own limitations, and your best efforts will be good enough. --Carol (Huffington > Turner) Menges > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:21:32 -0600 > From: "Donald Turner" <dturner8@hot.rr.com> > Subject: [TURNER] Fw: How do you give all of your the information to > your family ? > To: <turner@rootsweb.com> SNIP> > What form have most people used to make this information available to > other members of the family? Narrative-raw information etc.I do plain to > put it in a book for the children and other members of the family. I guess > I should also add that I use Family Tree Maker 2006. > Donald

Donald, I have used some of the methods already reported in this thread. I have a couple of suggestions too. First, if you publish in print form, send two copies to the Library of Congress (LoC) in Washington, DC. If you wish to copyright your genealogy, that must be done through the Copyright Office of LoC. They have an extensive collection of genealogies. If you ever go to Washington, be sure to visit the Local History and Genealogy reading room. In 2005, I put together a history of my mother's family, (Westfall-Maxwell). I used a lot of the photographs that she had collected over the years and it added up to about 100 pages. Instead of printing it, I copied the file and photographs to CD-Rs and sent it to my cousins by mail for Christmas. It made a big hit with them. Publishing on a CD-R is cheaper and easier than publishing a book. CD-Rs cost less than a quarter apiece and the cost of mailing them first class is much less than sending a book through the mail. A single CD-R holds up to 2,000 pages of text and there aren't many genealogies that long. I used the PDF format for the genealogy so that each recipient can either view it on a computer monitor or take it to Kinko's and have it printed. Since it is in a machine-readable format, my relatives can add to the family history too. I use The Master Genealogist for genealogical information and I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to edit and enhance photographs and to create the PDF document. Phil Turner > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:21:32 -0600 > From: "Donald Turner" > Subject: [TURNER] Fw: How do you give all of your the information to > your family ? > To: SNIP> > What form have most people used to make this information available to > other members of the family? Narrative-raw information etc.I do plain to > put it in a book for the children and other members of the family. I guess > I should also add that I use Family Tree Maker 2006. > Donald ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to TURNER-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message