User talk:Corsair II

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Bankstons of Red River County [24 July 2012]

Welcome aboard WeRelate -- I think you're going to find this is a different sort of genealogy site than you've probably been used to. Regarding the Bankstons, I ought to say up front that I'm not connected to them -- not directly. I spent 30+ years on the staff of the Dallas Public Library, began doing serious genealogy back in the '60s, and did a good deal of research on my ex-wife's family, the Jacksons, who were from Red River. Micajah's wife, Sarah, was a gr-gr-however-many-gr-aunt of my wife. I got particularly interested in old Red River, though, and did a master's thesis on the area. We used to go up there every year, to the "grave working" at Lone Star Cemetery, which was on Calvin Jackson's land, and I talked to the old folks and took lots of notes. And I spent probably several hundred hours at the courthouse over the years. I'm now remarried, retired, and living near Baton Rouge, and I haven't physically been back to Clarksville in more than a decade. But now I'll have to go back through my tons of notes and see if there's anything on the Bankstons I neglected to post.

At WeRelate, I've been developing the "The Red River Project" (among others). You can find an explanation of all that on my own user page. (Just click on my signature, below.)

The main point at WR, as a wiki, is that anyone (who's registered) can edit anything. The goal is to have a single page for each individual and for each family. And we emphasize "good practice," which includes source citations -- though many people don't bother, which is annoying. So do add anything you know to the pages that already exist, correct any errors you find (i.e., I simply assumed Micajah had died in Red River, though I didn't have a date or know of a gravesite), post old family photos you might have access to, or scans of a family Bible, or whatever -- and then begin adding new Person and Family pages for people not already here. If you've ever done editing at Wikipedia, the software is the same, and it's pretty easy to learn. You can add new pages either by uploading a GEDCOM file -- we recommend keeping it relatively small and then cleaning up the new pages afterward -- or by creating pages one at a time. Most of us do it both ways, depending on the situation. And note that you can "Watch" any page of interest to you, so as to be informed of subsequent changes. (You're marked as "watching" automatically for any pages you create or edit.) WeRelate pages are heavily represented in Google's search results, BTW, so you may turn up additonal contacts. I've already discovered several distant cousins in my own family who had documents that descended through their lines from our common ancestor, so you never know! --Mike^Talk 17:11, 24 July 2012 (EDT)