DEVON-L Archives

Archiver > DEVON > 2003-08 > 1060289137


From: "Jo" <>
Subject: RE: [DEV] OPC Scheme
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 21:45:42 +0100
In-Reply-To: <18b.1dea0218.2c62dc27@aol.com>


I've never offered a comment before now on the Genuki sites but Chris's
mail below stirred me to respond. His comments are all perfect sense and
in turn, explain why so many people ask for personal help...the genuki
pages are fabulous but I have sometimes found links no longer work etc
or they can occasionally take you to pages where you get lost and
confused in jargon and never-ending links elsewhere...it starts to
become unwieldy...but there are - too- some excellent fantastic links.
We live a min' of 140 miles from any family ancestry locality of ours
and so visits to LDS/FHS's etc are impossible for us. We work full time,
like Chris. We belong to 5 genuki mail sites so get dozens of mails
daily plus our own business ones..but we stroll through each one in the
hope of finding a nugget of info'..or sometimes just general interest.

Like many family tree researchers I'm neither an internet expert nor a
genealogy expert but have been amazed by the helpfulness of genuki
contributors...to the point we've tried to put something back ourselves
and next week we are taking a day out of our annual holiday to take some
pic's for a contributor from Australia in Devon of ancestral sites, and
my husband is just about to finish indexing the 1891 Plymouth census in
database format for others to use..as a way of saying thanks.

I recently approached a gentleman from a website I was led to for
assistance and received an extremely rude response which alluded to me
being thick and had naughtily not read his house rules for applying for
assistance. If you're going to put info on the web then expect to be
asked questions! (In fact I had read his "rules" and had asked a
perfectly sensible question!)

Before I get slapped by the off-topic police (OTP'S?) I'll go! Thanks
everyone!

Jo/Cotswolds



-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:]
Sent: 06 August 2003 23:33
To:
Subject: Re: [DEV] OPC Scheme


As I see it, the success of the OPC scheme has been to make available a
band
of dedicated volunteers who collate and pass on information about their
respective parishes.

Like other OPCs, I took my turn to buy the DRO fiche parish registers
(which
vary from extensive to downright minimal) for quite a lot of money, and
I make
the information available to those that ask - and, in return, quite a
few
reciprocate with their own pedigrees, copy documents and so on. That's
fun,
useful and rewarding.

I'm gradually transcribing the PRs so someday they can go on a website
and
Genuki, but like many others, I have a daytime job, 100 emails a day in
the
evening, and this all takes time. I still regard myself as an amateur. I
was the
guilty party a couple of weeks ago, 13 days to respond to research I
volunteered to provide (a week of which I was abroad). At the moment, I
hope we're doing
enough.

I would just like to say that, at the beginning, it seemed like one way
traffic. Now I get so many contributions from other listers that my
indexes and
database are beginning to heave, that's really great. Add to that the
daily
exchanges about this and that family, all helps to build up a greater
knowledge of
the parishes we look after. Quite a few of us live hundreds of miles
from
them, some of us on the other side of the world to boot.

Chris Graves
OPC Sidbury & Salcombe Regis


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