This website has now mushroomed to 116 subscribers, 47 more than two days ago!  I’ve got over 70 e mails relating to this website that needs replying to.  If I’m a bit slow in replying to you / I’ve forgotten something / got mixed up / some other reason I’ve failed in some way … my excuse is its hard work keeping up with over 100 families.

Please don’t take any of that the wrong way, I want to communicate with people, and I hope this site develops your research.  Just, lots of questions re: keeping up with this.  Where possible, please use the forum, at least to interact with others.

Already people are asking me how to build a tree within the database.  I need to transfer instructions from somewhere else, and take this at a steady pace.  First things first though, I need to develop a page which summarises people’s research interests, and reply to those e mails of course …

I’ve just searched 176 surnames on GenesReunited, and contacted all those with a Trefeglwys link.  If you’ve arrived here via Genes, welcome to the site!  Now we need to get you all to talk to each other, collaborative working in order to identify links between families.

Of course I contacted a couple of people who have been involved in the site since the early days, and I was trying to avoid.  I recognised some researchers names against their ancestors, but the twigs of their trees would catch me out.  Apologies.

Going through surnames (tree that’s already there, census returns), made me realise I already have a good idea which surnames were prominent in the parish, and knew before hitting the search button roughly how many results I was going to get.  However, just doing this also frightens me, re the bottomless pit this whole thing is.

One thing that is becoming clearer, is the need to attribute people in the current database to their researchers, their family or who inputted the information.  Since sending out a newsletter last week, relating to this site there’s already been a few matches, i.e. people joining the site have found an ancestor already inputted by someone else.

Frustration on my part, going through old discussion archives in an attempt to try and identify which family someone belongs to.  Realising that I cannot keep this up on a long term basis, where such a project can only get larger.

Currently there’s 840 names in the database, all of which need matching up to a researcher(s).  To address this, I suggest a note is added to each person, and who they are connected to.  Such as “Linked to Joe Bloggs”, or “This person was inputted by and related to Joe Bloggs”.

For old timers, if you have time, please could you go through your family tree, or entries you’ve inputted and add a note to each person via the admin interface.  Please could you also do the same for any new entries which you might create.  This can only be of longer term benefit to us all, to start the very long process of linking families up.