The Team

So far the team is me, a guy named Mike. This isn’t my day job, this is something I work on because I hope it will be useful for myself and others. Anyone else who wants to help out, read the section below on contributing, but basically anyone can join the team. And really, by just using this site to organize your own family history research, you contribute tips and provide the data that makes this site useful. So anyone using this site is also part of the team. So if that’s you, welcome to the team! Happy to have you.

Our Mission

Make family history research dead easy. Organize our family history research, and build up a repository of organized family history research tips for others to follow. We want this to be a trustworthy way to measure the usefulness of family history research tools. We want to encourage development of new, and even better tools, even if they replace this one.

Ideology

Embrace openness. Site users ought to share research tips they discover so others can use them, and they ought to share how well others’ tips worked for them. The site maintainers ought to be open about what computer code is running the site, how it is being used, how donations are used and what expenses are incurred, and what we’re working toward next.

Contributing

There are lots of ways to contribute:

  • use this site to research your own family history. In so doing you’re creating research tips others might find helpful, providing feedback on others’ research tips, and hopefully experiencing the joy of learning about your heritage
  • use this site to share your knowledge of family history research. If you’re a seasoned genealogist, with a wealth of knowledge, please share it! Your categorized tips will be used by those who need them. Feel good about helping experience the thrill of family history
  • moderate submitted content. Realistically, lots of people will create create research goals, tips, or make comments in an incorrect, or possibly even abusive, way. We need people to help keep things in line. Please contact us if you would like to become a moderator to help keep this organized.
  • submit computer code or design or website copy. If you think you could make the computer code better, or the design more appealing or user friendly, or could write more understandable content, please open an issue, or better yet, create a pull request on our github repo.
  • report bugs and suggest improvements. I’d love these to be added to our github issue tracker, but if that scares you just use our contact page
  • make a donation. We’ll set up a way to facilitate this, but for now just contact us and I can send you details about how to do this
  • tell others. Let them know how this has helped you in social media or just in person

What is My Ultimate Vision of this Site?

  1. It will eventually become a great way for me and others to keep our research organized.
  2. It will be a great way to search for tips to do  little like Google, but tailored specifically to doing family history research, and the searches for tips will be based on the individual being researched’s life events (eg estimated birthyear, birthplace, etc) not just on text.
  3. It will become a way to gauge the usefulness of nearly all family history resources to any given situation. So this will help rate family history resources, but in context of what someone might be researching.
  4. This will not be run by a single individual or company for profits. We certainly don’t want to create a patent or anything like that. This should be run by a non-profit organization dedicated to the above-mentioned goals, not turning a profit (of course, we’ll have to cover expenses at the end of the day). This means that when the site suggests you use a particular website to find information on an individual, we aren’t doing it because they’re paying us a referral fee. We’re doing it because it’s actually what we think would be best. We want you to be able to trust information gathered from this site.
  5. The computer code that runs this website should be open source. That means that if you want to, and develop the technical skills, you can read exactly what this website does and how it does it. This means you can know exactly what we’re doing with the data you input into this site. It also means you can not only contribute by using the site, but you can even submit your own code to improve the site. This also means that if you aren’t happy with how we’re running this website, you can use all our code and create your own copy of the site. Yep, if you think you can run this better, be my guest (but it would be nice if we worked together instead of in competition).
  6. That this site will inspire other tools, possibly better ones. Because as you use software invariably changes you; eg as I started using email back in the day, sometimes I wanted to send email attachments that were too big. Hence why a service like Dropbox, which facilitates sending large files, began to appear useful. But before I had used email and ran into that limitation, I had no need for Dropbox. So as we use this site, users will hopefully realize new opportunities and tools, and those will help make family history even more dead easy.