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Latest General Updates

Weekly Report

Data Work Progress Notes

What a week! I thought for sure I was going to miss and come out way short of reaching our goal for the week, but to my shock, we were able to get back on track! Praise the Lord God! We did manage to get another 5% completed on the locations and so should have three more weeks of this marathon to go, excepting any failures on my part, or interruptions to do other important things.

This moves us into the B section! So C is now done! We are finding that there are less cemeteries to be located, but instead more merges are made. We added another 35 cemeteries this week, and located three more that we had listed, but could not find.

Responding to email is now completely out of control. There has been the expected dramatic increase in requests now that the Roman calendar has announced its “new year.” We expect email to be out of control now for the next several weeks. We did find that email is not getting through! If you have not heard a response from me to your email, or if you got a notice saying the address does not exist, please resend those emails! We checked and there is currently no spam or filters on our email account! I wish I knew why some emails do not get through. Maybe the email server is overloaded at our hosting company. We may need to move to another system for email if this continues.

We held our breath this last week as we saw our bandwidth usage for the month creep up to the limit! I have never seen that before! We will have to watch to see if it continues to get so close to the cutoff point! This could mean some serious expenses will be incurred to keep the website online!

Another background fix was the usage analyzer. It turns out we never got the settings fixed, so it has been non-operational. We fixed that and hope it will help us understand the high level of bandwidth usage, to see if there is a problem we can fix to lower it.

Pending

  1. Location Cleanup (in progress 85% done). Top Priority. This is in an all out blitz. Can we make it three more weeks?
  2. Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (C, D, E, F, G, H, Y, Z done)
  3. Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started) IMPORTANT!!!
  4. Albums rebuilt
  5. Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
  6. Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
  7. Alternate family names moved to AKA names
  8. Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
  9. Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
  10. Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.) (i121712 re Lori Renolds email)
  11. Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
  12. Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
  13. Start the newsletter
  14. Public comments and memorials for each person?
  15. Help videos made and implemented

Cemetery

Just about another 35 cemeteries added this week. Three more scheduled weeks to go to finish this long miserable process! Will we make it?

Weekly Progress

  1. What a painful week! We pressed hard and all I can say is this is not fun! We figure we have four more weeks to go on the locations work, if I can keep the pace up, to the cost of everything else. So the good news is we hit the coveted 80% mark, but just barely. We also reached our goal of getting 700 new locations resolved. Our daily goal of 136 for six days missed our mark by about 40 due to merging, so even today I had to press hard to add a new batch. This gets us to Ceres, so we broke through the CH section! There were lots of French places that were hard or impossible to find, so we had to back away to keep moving. We also got through the church section.
  2. We did some feeble work in the Douthit section, and you can see more in their directory.
  3. In the cemetery department we crossed the 1400th cemetery listing, with 44 new ones added. It is fun to find locations that have been mislabeled and so all I have to do is add them to already found cemeteries. More of that is happening now.
  4. Behind the scenes there is more happening. We are getting more Gambrell information assembled for a blitz on that family. We also hope to finish up work on the Daniel Erhardt family so we can publish those results.
  5. There were dozens of changes made to individuals in the file, as we fix locations, we find info here and there to add or correct. Stopping to list it all would take too long. Just fixing locations impacts hundreds of individuals.

Pending

  1. Location Cleanup (in progress 80% done). Top Priority. This is in an all out blitz. Can we make it four more weeks?
  2. Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (D, E, F, G, H, Y, Z done)
  3. Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started) IMPORTANT!!!
  4. Albums rebuilt
  5. Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
  6. Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
  7. Alternate family names moved to AKA names
  8. Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
  9. Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
  10. Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.) (i121712 re Lori Renolds email)
  11. Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
  12. Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
  13. Start the newsletter
  14. Public comments and memorials for each person?
  15. Help videos made and implemented

Cemetery work

We continue the hammering away at the locations of cemeteries! Hopefully just four more weeks to go on this marathon.

General Progress

  1. Well, this is embarrassing! I was buzzing along getting things ready, and my computer crashed! Then this program that is supposed to be auto saving my work, turned out to not have saved anything! Possibly that is why the computer crashed? So now we will try to reconstruct our list, but will most certainly leave out one or more things!
  2. The locations went smoothly! We have crossed the 75% completion mark, with our 700 locations work this week. We are pushing hard to end this project in the next couple of months, so hope we can finally see the end of this! Also we are now in the C section! D is finished!
  3. Cemeteries had 38 new entries that came up! I was surprised to not have more in the location section, but that makes everything easier! With the crashing of the computer the last section of the cemetery list had to be reconstructed. Oh, Well! So much for getting sleep tonight!
  4. Betty Knecht sent info on her family (Eugene Hugo Knecht), so that section was cleaned and updated. Thanks Betty!
  5. We did some Macomber updates from email, (see under Macomber family news)
  6. We did some Douthit updates from email, (see under Douthit family news).

Pending

  1. Location Cleanup (in progress 75% done)
  2. Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (D, E, F, G, H, Y, Z done)
  3. Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started) IMPORTANT!!!
  4. Albums rebuilt
  5. Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
  6. Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
  7. Alternate family names moved to AKA names
  8. Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
  9. Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
  10. Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.) (i121712 re Lori Renolds email)
  11. Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
  12. Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
  13. Start the newsletter
  14. Public comments and memorials for each person?
  15. Help videos made and implemented

Cemeteries ….

On, and on these go! Where the end is, is coming soon! Well another batch is done! 38 new cemeteries, and one relabeled and another removed!

General Progress

This Week

  1. Expanded info on Wyomarus de Greenwode (i29856) re Carol Rogan email
  2. Updates from Christina Kaiser on living relatives
  3. Several new family members added to the Lord family from new website member Mary Ester Smith, beginning with Aylesberry Russel  Lord
  4. Cleared various emails, but still behind with several more to finish handling from Dec to now.
  5. Location progress is the main focus. If I can push really hard and not handle expansion or research right now, I might get the location nightmare finished in two months, or about mid March. This will finally free me up to start handling the many other problems in the data as well as systematically adding to what we have. In that spirit we pushed the limits and moved from 65% to 70%. We also reduced the location number by 124, and reset many extra locations. Unfortunately for me, there are still 5076 locations to go!
  6. No new photos or documents were added

Pending

  1. Location Cleanup (in progress 70% done)
  2. Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (E, F, G, H, Y, Z done)
  1. Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started)  IMPORTANT!!!
  2. Albums rebuilt
  3. Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
  4. Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
  5. Alternate family names moved to AKA names
  6. Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
  7. Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
  8. Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.)  (i121712 re Lori Renolds email)
  9. Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
  10. Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
  11. Start the newsletter
  12. Public comments and memorials for each person?
  13. Help videos made and implemented

Cemeteries

Well, needless to say, I am sick of this project! We have been at this for many hours a week for over a year now. I do wish there was a way to get reimbursed for the time and expense of doing this, but such is life: Work hard and then die and your work is forever stolen, forgotten, or destroyed. Only the thieves make a living on people’s hard labor. We are pushing hard to hit the finish line and did get the E section done and are well on our way into the D section. This week we add 37 more cemeteries and redid one, making 38 in all.

    General Progress

    This Week

    Removed UK from Y & Z locations

    Corrected ambiguous and misspellings in Y

    61 cemeteries pinpointed and properly set up. What a job! and some of them are really hard to figure out and find! Shame on the people that threw the records together and did not bother.

    Our goal was to push for having 2/3rds of the locations finished, which was far beyond my ability, and, yes, I proved myself incapable of such a push. We were just shy of 1% of making the mark, which is still really good. To do that we got over 3% done, which is three times our weekly goal.

    But there was a cost to all that. It was hard not to stop and add census sheets and grave site info to all the people we had to hunt down to resolve the ridiculous place names and misspellings! But frankly, until these locations get resolved the rest of the work is hampered, so the sooner done the sooner we can get back to what we need to do.

    If I can keep up the fast pace of 1% a week on the places setups, I will still be doing this in September. That is just too long, but it may be necessary. It is still much sooner than the 5 years the project started out to be. Remember, we started with over 90,000 locations, and have knocked it all the way down to over 17,000, so that alone is a huge task. I have really lost respect for those that just put whatever down as a location. The least they could do is put things down in a proper and consistent format that could be easily figured out. Making everything just short of a full case of charades is a real detriment.

    We sprung for a program that promised to help things out, but alas, it was money wasted for that purpose. The folks have assembled a great database of locations, but our work goes beyond theirs by several leagues. It did however help locate some locations that could be better named in the Y section.

    The cost of the big push meant that nothing got done in the email room. I’ll have to work triple time to get caught up and to dig deeper into the past email backlog.

    Oh! and buried in the push was the fact we got another alphabet letter section completed! We are done with the F section and charging quickly through the E section. We are still a long way from what we had done when we started at the beginning with the number locations and so forth. We figure we were in C or D when we stopped and finally had a process we wanted to follow. So we are hoping that once we reach where ever that was, we will be able to proceed much faster on locations!

    Pending

    1. Location Cleanup (in progress 65% done)
    2. Removing the United Kingdom in locations and putting Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England as autonomous countries (G, H, Y, Z done)
    3. Set the default photos for each person! Build a script to activate and preserve them. (started)
    4. Albums rebuilt
    5. Photo hover links for photos with 3 or more people in them.
    6. Nick Names removed from Proper names to AKA names
    7. Alternate family names moved to AKA names
    8. Surname prefixes removed from first names field (de van, etc.)
    9. Multiple spellings of surnames moved to AKA
    10. Multiple parents resolved (except for adoptions, etc.)
    11. Possible duplicate name entries rechecked
    12. Membership cleanup (remove inactive members)
    13. Start the newsletter
    14. Public comments and memorials for each person?
    15. Help videos made and implemented

     

    Cemeteries

    Be careful about what you wish for! I thought I would get hit hard with cemetery work the last couple of weeks, and did not, but now…! So 61 cemeteries have been resolved! And we passed the 1300 mark.