Difference between revisions of "MouserAncestry:About"

Revision as of 09:02, 18 February 2012

A brief history of this website

My mother has been pursuing a hobby of genealogy for over 30 years, collecting a massive database of family records, source documents, and correspondence from fellow researchers and distant relatives. This database existed primarily as a filing cabinet filled with hard-copy documents. Recently, she began digitizing some data from these records and inserting them into computer databases using genealogy software. This allowed for redundancy of the genealogical records and also facilitated easy delivery of information to other researchers when they requested it.

I felt that there was still some untapped capacity for computers and the internet to both increase my mother's ability to collect information for her own research, and for other researchers to become aware of the work already conducted by my mother. I suggested that we create a web-accessible, searchable representation of her research data. This would allow other researchers to find her data using common search tools like Google, allow people who may not be genealogy enthusiasts to see what is involved in the hobby, and to act as an off-site backup of the information stored in mom's file cabinet. We agreed that I would host the project as part of my website (mouser.org), and that the genealogical record would be constructed with me as the root person (thus including my father's side of the family as well). This project was begun in August of 2006.

This website is the result. We have made a concerted effort to include high-resolution images of source documents whenever we can, and not to include information that is speculation unless it is explicitly marked as such. As of January 1, 2008, all of the information and source documents we have for my direct-line ancestors is present on this site. The non-direct ancestors are still a work in progress, with varying levels of completeness.

The data contained here includes work by many contributors.

--Richard "Mouser" Williams, 30 Dec 2007

Update, 18 Feb 2012

I made a version of this genealogy wiki for my then-girlfriend Nina a few years back. We were married this past November and I have added the material from her family tree into the main site. The bulk of the initial data for Nina's side of the family came from the work of Lois and Peter Robertson as well as some informal discussions at Lanza family Christmas get-togethers. Thanks to everyone for making this site possible.

--Richard

Contact information for the site administrators

We would like to hear from you with corrections, comments, additional material, photos, sources, transcripts or scans of source material, useful websites, links, etc. If you would like to get in touch with us, please send an email to genealogy@mouser.org and liz.williams.art@hotmail.com. If you contribute genealogical information to this website and would like to be listed on the contributors page, please indicate that in your correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in this site.