Well a lot has happened since the last GenerousGenealogists newsletter. We have reorganized a lot of our material, added a number of significant new features as well.

The Latest

Site Performance

Many of you may have noticed that over the past few weeks our site has been experiencing significant performance problems.  Such are the joys of being popular and busy, I guess. In order to address the issues in the short term, I have had to redesign and reformat many of the site internals as well as replacing the Home (or Landing) page.  If you want to read about some of details around this effort, much is documented in our Wiki.  If you are inclined to want to help us with our performance issues… any donation amount will be applied to funding our move into a more robust computing platform. Please Donate using the link on our home page.

Free Site Offerings

In case you have not been to the site in a while here is a listing of the major site functions as of this Newsletter. If you have not tested or explored them, please do (remember there’s no charge!):

• Volunteer Database is the place to go if you want to be a volunteer or, if you are seeking assistance in looking up information, getting photos, accessing specific texts, etc. This area is similar in function to the old RAOGK.
• Brickwall Forums  is available to provide you assistance in addressing your family search Brickwalls.
• The Brickwall Showcase area is not necessarily populated with true Brickwalls, in the genealogical sense.  Rather these are family stories, facts, and mysteries we want to share with the world.  Perhaps someone out there has clues or insights to help expand and/or verify the items presented here.  If not, we hope you enjoy reading them and pondering their import.
• Coaching is an area we are constantly growing to assist you in developing more robust genealogy research skills and awareness; it is, also, where our Guest authors publish their articles and guidance.
• The Wiki exists to document and share information on “how-to” conduct and manage genealogy research. “The Wiki” also serves as the platform for documenting our ‘collective’ preferences regarding the conduct of genealogy work.
• FamilyEcho is a free online tool which allows you to build an interactive family tree of your ancestry, going back far into the past. Invite your family members to collaborate with you, online, and fill in the missing details.
• Question & Answers Area is actually a part of our interactive coaching and knowledge sharing- ask anything you want about genealogy or our site… who knows what interesting information you may encounter. This area is very much like Yahoo Answers.
• News! provides quick access to all of our most current articles and postings.
• Our Shop is where we offer various shirts, hats, mugs, etc. with our “all too cool” logo.
• Archives is where we store all of our past News articles and Postings.

Lastly, let me point out that we now have a Quick Link (drop-down menu) at the top right of every web page.  Simply click on the Quick Links label and a menu will appear with links to all the items listed above.  Hopefully this feature will make navigating the site easier and quicker.

Articles & Sharing

I should mention, if any of you have articles that you might like to share with our community, do not hesitate to let me know.  We can always use good lesson-learned, tips, pointers, humorous anecdotes .  I am happy to work with you to publish your materials here, if you would like to share . Also as you read pages or articles here, please share them with others.  For those of you who tweet or use facebook, etc. please spread the social love.

Closing

In closing, I would request that each of you spread the word about GenerousGenealogists anywhere it seems there might be a good audience.  Talk to your genealogy buddies, online friends, groups, associations, or… whomever.  The more folks who hear about us, the more we can help.  Oh and in the shameless plug arena… volunteer to help others whenever and wherever you can.