Casting
Right with 'the Net'
By Sherlene Hall Bartholomew
Have you wanted to set up a family web site that has good content and
is open to the public?
Not only is this an effective way to share information with all in our
families, but this is another way to find those fun, fascinating
Internet cousins we’ve been telling you about.
A couple of months ago I met one such cousin “on the net,” as referred
by another cousin from yet another, with whom I traded
e-addresses at BYU’s Education Week. We were hardly introduced
when Allen W. Leigh volunteered to set up a website about
descendants of our joint ancestor Fielding Langford. On
this site, he has already posted over 3,000 names my mother
Ida-Rose L. Hall compiled, along with a book, research
paper, family histories, and other materials that represent
her life’s work. It has been an inspiration to see Allen’s
enthusiasm and skill getting that site up, along with
others for which he serves as webmaster.
In a recent letter, Allen told me how he got hooked on the benefits of
having a family website:
 |
| Samuel
Leigh 1815 - 1894
|
We knew my great-grandfather Samuel
Leigh had a brother and two sisters and came to Utah from
Wales. We knew nothing about his older sister, except
that she was a teen and perhaps died young. My sister
Norma Leigh Rudinsky and I set up a leigh.org site on
which we included the genealogies that we had for each
branch of Samuel’s family.
 |
David
Phillips 1794-1874, husband of Mary Leigh (no photo
of Mary known to exist)
|
One day I received an e-mail from
Wendell Phillips, of Florida, who had visited the Leigh
site. He was a descendant from this older sister named
Mary Leigh Phillips, who we learned had moved from Wales
to New York, then to Canada. Via e-mail, he sent me about
fifty names that covered several generations.
Lynne Nielson, a descendant of the
other daughter of Samuel Leigh, Sarah Rees Leigh Walters,
discovered leigh.org and informed us that Sarah moved
from Wales to Cache Valley and settled in Wellsville.
She also e-mailed us with an offer to supply information.
 |
Sarah
Rees Leigh Walters 1806-1892
|
Each branch in this family was represented
when Rebecca Hooper, a descendant of Samuel’s son Daniel
Leigh (who moved from Wales to southern Idaho) also found
our site and e-mailed me with an offer to supply information.
These three distant cousins sent family group records,
histories, and photographs. All I had to do was plop them
into the site.
Since setting up such sites, I have
received e-mail from cousins all the way from Alaska to
Australia. Of great interest was mail received from Leigh
cousins who remained in Wales. We look forward to their
contributions to the site, informing us about branches
of the family still in the “Old Country.”
Beyond that, I received a copy of
the journal of Samuel Leigh from a cousin in Blanding,
Utah. We already had the journal, but it was thoughtful
of her to mail it—it’s amazing what records cousins will
share, if they just know where to find us!
Just today I received a ged from
a distant cousin who had visited my Leigh site and wrote
to express her excitement in finding it. She is descended
from a son of Samuel Leigh--we had no information about
that branch on our family tree. We now have much of their
genealogy and are gleaning family stories from these new-found
cousins.
After Samuel’s wife, my great-grandmother
died, he remarried and then came West. Because we set
up this website, my sister has received correspondence
from descendants of the second wife, who have given her
genealogies and a missionary journal of their ancestors—a
branch we previously knew little about.
All of this information is now available
to us because:
1) I make sure my sites have good
content that is open to the public (site addresses are
listed below as samples you may wish to adapt for your
own sites). Some families use free sites that are password
protected. Passwords are needed if you want to post information
on living persons, but such sites are useless for attracting
distant cousins.
My suggestion is to either mix protected
and non-protected pages, if you’re allowed to do that,
or to have a protected site for the living and an open
site for your deceased family members. There are certain
pages in leigh.org that are about my sisters and me, and
those pages are password protected. Also, there are no
links to them (you have to know the exact URL to find
them). The rest of the leigh.org site is open.
My wife’s Norwegian site at http://www.bergstedt.org/
is similar. The pages for family reunion pictures are
password protected (but are linked from the home page),
and the rest of the site is open. We have received two
e-mails from distant cousins in Norway who discovered
the site. They have not yet provided information, but
communication has been established between US and Norwegian
branches of the family.
I also set up a site on the Websters
in Cedar City. My great-grandfather Francis Webster came
west with the Martin Handcart Company. A cousin in Las
Vegas found this site and gave me a CD with 3000 family
pictures on it!
Since I do my own site design, rather
than use a template from a free site, I can mix open and
password protected pages. People using free sites would
need to have two sites. There are many free sites available
that are not necessarily related to genealogy, but that
can be used for open sites.
My contact with you, Sherlene, came
by way of cousin David E. Langford, who visited my Mormon
site at http://www.shire.net/mormon/molunny.html.
On this site I give a recipe for “mulonny,” while detailing
that I am descended from James Harvey Langford of Kentucky,
so was raised on sorghum and corn bread. Cousin David
saw the reference to our common ancestor and sent me an
e-mail. Good food not only lures relatives to kitchens,
but to your sites, so it pays to attach an ancestor’s
name where applicable.
 |
James
H. Langford, Sr., son of Fielding, also a joint
ancestor of webmaster Allen Leigh and the author,
whose
information is posted on our new site.
|
2) The site must be designed to get
good rankings from the search engines. This requires
a bit of technical knowledge but is easy to learn and
do. My web site that teaches this and that I use in my
class at Westminster College is open to the public. It
is used for self-study by visitors from all over the world
and can be found at http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/.
With a little study and effort in implementing these ideas,
your site can get good rankings from search engines, which
will attract more visitors.
3) Visit the discussion forums at
various genealogy sites and leave links to your sites.
This is how I met Shiron Wordsworth, source of the intriguing
Langford stories you’ve carried in your columns. She
had replied to an e-mail from another person, and I replied
back, providing her with a link to our Langford site.
She then e-mailed me directly, and the rest is history.
4) Put a “signature” on your e-mail
that gives a one-line description and a link to your site.
Let your e-mail advertise your site.
Of course there are other ways to
find cousins via the Internet, but these are ideas that
have helped me. Your column and articles have brought
responses to ancestral names you mention. There are newsgroups
on genealogy and family history on which you can post
links to your site. Be careful, though, because spammers
mine e-mail addresses from newsgroups and web pages, though
there are ways to reduce this problem that I give in my
site on learning web design.
Allen
Modern Welsh Leigh Families and Connecting Lines http://www.leigh.org/
Leighs in Wales before 1850
http://www.leigh.org/genealogy/
Websters in Cedar City
http://www.webster-family.org/
Fielding Langford Family
http://www.fieldinglangford.com/
Submitted to Meridianmagazine.com 16 Nov 2003
Sherlene Hall Bartholomew, copyright 2003
