Casting Right with 'the Net'
By Sherlene Hall Bartholomew

Have you wanted to set up a family web site that has good content and is open to the public?

Not only is this an effective way to share information with all in our families, but this is another way to find those fun, fascinating Internet cousins we’ve been telling you about.

A couple of months ago I met one such cousin “on the net,” as referred by another cousin from yet another, with whom I traded e-addresses at BYU’s Education Week.  We were hardly introduced when Allen W. Leigh volunteered to set up a website about descendants of our joint ancestor Fielding Langford. On this site, he has already posted over 3,000 names my mother Ida-Rose L. Hall compiled, along with a book, research paper, family histories, and other materials that represent her life’s work. It has been an inspiration to see Allen’s enthusiasm and skill getting that site up, along with others for which he serves as webmaster. 

In a recent letter, Allen told me how he got hooked on the benefits of having a family website:

Samuel Leigh 1815 - 1894

We knew my great-grandfather Samuel Leigh had a brother and two sisters and came to Utah from Wales.  We knew nothing about his older sister, except that she was a teen and perhaps died young. My sister Norma Leigh Rudinsky and I set up a leigh.org site on which we included the genealogies that we had for each branch of Samuel’s family.

One day I received an e-mail from Wendell Phillips, of Florida, who had visited the Leigh site.  He was a descendant from this older sister named Mary Leigh Phillips, who we learned had moved from Wales to New York, then to Canada. Via e-mail, he sent me about fifty names that covered several generations.

Lynne Nielson, a descendant of the other daughter of Samuel Leigh, Sarah Rees Leigh Walters, discovered leigh.org and informed us that Sarah moved from Wales to Cache Valley and settled in Wellsville.  She also e-mailed us with an offer to supply information.

 

David Phillips 1794-1874, husband of Mary Leigh (no photo of Mary known to exist)

Each branch in this family was represented when Rebecca Hooper, a descendant of Samuel’s son Daniel Leigh (who moved from Wales to southern Idaho) also found our site and e-mailed me with an offer to supply information. These three distant cousins sent family group records, histories, and photographs. All I had to do was plop them into the site. 

Since setting up such sites, I have received e-mail from cousins all the way from Alaska to Australia. Of great interest was mail received from Leigh cousins who remained in Wales.  We look forward to their contributions to the site, informing us about branches of the family still in the “Old Country.”

Beyond that, I received a copy of the journal of Samuel Leigh from a cousin in Blanding, Utah.  We already had the journal, but it was thoughtful of her to mail it—it’s amazing what records cousins will share, if they just know where to find us!

Just today I received a ged from a distant cousin who had visited my Leigh site and wrote to express her excitement in finding it.  She is descended from a son of Samuel Leigh--we had no information about that branch on our family tree.  We now have much of their genealogy and are gleaning family stories from these new-found cousins.

After Samuel’s wife, my great-grandmother died, he remarried and then came West.  Because we set up this website, my sister has received correspondence from descendants of the second wife, who have given her genealogies and a missionary journal of their ancestors—a branch we previously knew little about.

Sarah Rees Leigh Walters 1806-1892

All of this information is now available to us because:

1) I make sure my sites have good content that is open to the public (site addresses are listed below as samples you may wish to adapt for your own sites).  Some families use free sites that are password protected.  Passwords are needed if you want to post information on living persons, but such sites are useless for attracting distant cousins.

My suggestion is to either mix protected and non-protected pages, if you’re allowed to do that, or to have a protected site for the living and an open site for your deceased family members. There are certain pages in leigh.org that are about my sisters and me, and those pages are password protected.  Also, there are no links to them (you have to know the exact URL to find them).  The rest of the leigh.org site is open.

My wife’s Norwegian site at http://www.bergstedt.org/ is similar.  The pages for family reunion pictures are password protected (but are linked from the home page), and the rest of the site is open.  We have received two e-mails from distant cousins in Norway who discovered the site.  They have not yet provided information, but communication has been established between US and Norwegian branches of the family.

I also set up a site on the Websters in Cedar City.  My great-grandfather Francis Webster came west with the Martin Handcart Company.  A cousin in Las Vegas found this site and gave me a CD with 3000 family pictures on it!

Since I do my own site design, rather than use a template from a free site, I can mix open and password protected pages.  People using free sites would need to have two sites.  There are many free sites available that are not necessarily related to genealogy, but that can be used for open sites.

My contact with you, Sherlene, came by way of cousin David E. Langford, who visited my Mormon site at http://www.shire.net/mormon/molunny.html.  On this site I give a recipe for “mulonny,” while detailing that I am descended from James Harvey Langford of Kentucky, so was raised on sorghum and corn bread. Cousin David saw the reference to our common ancestor and sent me an e-mail. Good food not only lures relatives to kitchens, but to your sites, so it pays to attach an ancestor’s name where applicable.

James H. Langford, Sr., son of Fielding, also a joint ancestor of webmaster Allen Leigh and the author, whose information is posted on our new site.

2) The site must be designed to get good rankings from the search engines.  This requires a bit of technical knowledge but is easy to learn and do.  My web site that teaches this and that I use in my class at Westminster College is open to the public.  It is used for self-study by visitors from all over the world and can be found at http://www.shire.net/learnwebdesign/.  With a little study and effort in implementing these ideas, your site can get good rankings from search engines, which will attract more visitors.

3) Visit the discussion forums at various genealogy sites and leave links to your sites. This is how I met Shiron Wordsworth, source of the intriguing Langford stories you’ve carried in your columns.  She had replied to an e-mail from another person, and I replied back, providing her with a link to our Langford site.  She then e-mailed me directly, and the rest is history. 

4) Put a “signature” on your e-mail that gives a one-line description and a link to your site.  Let your e-mail advertise your site.

Of course there are other ways to find cousins via the Internet, but these are ideas that have helped me.  Your column and articles have brought responses to ancestral names you mention.  There are newsgroups on genealogy and family history on which you can post links to your site.  Be careful, though, because spammers mine e-mail addresses from newsgroups and web pages, though there are ways to reduce this problem that I give in my site on learning web design.

Allen 

Modern Welsh Leigh Families and Connecting Lines http://www.leigh.org/

Leighs in Wales before 1850
http://www.leigh.org/genealogy/

Websters in Cedar City
http://www.webster-family.org/

Fielding Langford Family
http://www.fieldinglangford.com/

­­­­­­

Submitted to Meridianmagazine.com 16 Nov 2003

Sherlene Hall Bartholomew, copyright 2003