To celebrate becoming a RootsChat Veteran, I want to record my appreciation of the phenomenon of RootsChat.
Trystan and Sarah have combined their talents to bring us a brilliantly designed and feature-laden message board system.
The Moderators have given loads of their time to set the tone and keep us quietly in order, keeping a well ordered and maintained site. Where else would a moderator get in touch with me to ask if my look-up query had been resolved so that the board (which has experienced over 9000 posts) can be kept tidy?
The RootsChatters are erudite, polite, funny, and committed. Whatever your skills and abilities, a RootsChatter can find a way to contribute to the general knowledge base found here, and get plenty of great stuff in return. And, the speed of those look-ups is astounding!
Have you looked across RootsChat recently to ensure you are making the best of it? Here’s a few reminders about some of the parts that are tucked away:
There is an excellent Surname Interests Table (Berlin-Bob would encourage me to ask you to ensure you have updated your interests recently) -
http://surname.rootschat.com/.
There’s 1901 census left-overs – are you contributing?
http://1901census.rootschat.com/A place to leave your homeless Victorian Photos -
http://victorian-photos.rootschat.net/.
And now a site dedicated to travelling people – Passing through -
http://romany.rootschat.net/ Many of us have taken up the opportunity and challenge of setting up our own family history websites through the free RootsChat websspace
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,23896.0.html. Without that facility, and the support of other RootsChatters, I doubt we would ever have done so.
And have you ever ventured into the RootsChatterBox ? I did for the first time the other day, and it was great fun. My other half signed up to RootsChat a few days ago, went in to RootsChatterBox and has hardly been seen since as she collects advice from there on how to find her Irish ancestors!
RootsChat is a phenomenon. At the time of writing, it is placed second as the genealogy site with most hits world-wide by genealogy.org
http://www.genealogy.org/index.asp?pos=1 . Whilst genealogy.org only counts sites registered with it, the fact that RootsChat just pips RootsWeb (an excellent resource, but US-based and supported by Ancestry.com) in the “hits chart” demonstrates what we all know about how good this site is.
RootsChat does not appear to be as acknowledged by the genealogy industry in the British Isles as much as perhaps it should be. This does seem unfair, but on the other hand us RootsChatters can keep it as our own little secret treasure. You can read about RootsChat in the public eye here -
http://surname.rootschat.com/lexicon/rc-media.phpI have gone on haven’t I? But I just wanted to say thank you to you all for making RootsChat what is – a phenomenon.
JULIAN
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