User:Jrm03063

Beginnings

I started a genealogical journey in the Fall of 1975, in the classroom of Dr. John J Kelly, instructor of US History at Reading Memorial High School. I made a fair bit of progress that year, due to the good fortune of having access to a trove of genealogy correspondence conducted by my Great-Grandmother, Charlotte "Lottie" Leach. Still, I was never really happy with the results. My work lacked sources and the logistical challenge of organizing the data was overwhelming. So the information I gathered that year, while a nice start, began a very long wait.

I also had the extremely good fortune to spend a lot of time with my paternal grandparents as a child, Cora Leach and James Clayton Mason. The experience left me steeped in family lore and traditions.

Revisiting the process

Thirty years passed, and I came into possession of my Mother-in-law's research card file and related materials. Reviewing her work was a journey back in time, to the hard old days of painfully collected and collated research. I was determined to preserve and duplicate her research so that all of her grandchildren could have it to enjoy and pass on. I was also hopeful that the tools of genealogy had made some progress. My findings on that were mixed.

Beginning work anew in early 2007, I picked up a subscription to ancestry. It was a great place to start, and I was able to very quickly get my Mother-in-law's information into a reasonable form. I was also able to recreate most of my research from 1976 as well. Very soon however, I realized that "ancestry.com" really wasn't a very useful place to be once you got past the easiest initial stage of your research. I found it most frustrating that there was no way to work collectively on the overall tree. I also regularly encountered defects in the ancestry web interface, which was not a particularly well done effort even when it was working correctly. I also found that my efforts were isolated and even the most well established lineages wound up being re-researched time and again, as new students enter a region of common interest. Finally, I didn't have a convenient (or free) way to share my results, without becoming a shill for the ancestry site.

At the same time, I was regularly using a "wiki" at my place of employment, as a means of internal documentation of our own work. I was struck by the idea that a "wiki" would be a great way to manage genealogy information. I googled the two terms and found my way to werelate.

Current Objectives

My research interests include:

• Merging every duplicate person or family page I find.

• Preserving research in a state that allows others to carry on without a painful initial startup (you know, "werelate").