“You say Yes. I say No.

You say Why? I say I don’t know.

Oh,

I don’t know why you say goodbye.

I say hello.”       — Lennon-McCartney

              • What kind of world would this be if I didn’t zig while the rest of the world zagged? After all, I have a history of choosing the other lane, don’t I? Examples: When everyone else disco’d through the 70s, I rocked out with Ozzy. When my childhood girlfriends oohed and ahhed over the likes of David Cassidy and Michael Jackson, I proudly displayed my Al Unser and Mario Andretti posters. My entire family left the state of California, and here I sit, happy as a lark.

So, what do you expect me to do? Join the thousands of genealogists who have bought into the MyFamily.com craze? No, not me. I’ve been completely happy with the outcome of my past decisions, and so with confidence, I have decided to leave the likes of MyFamily.com and their sister site “Freepages” at Rootsweb. The truth is that freepages wasn’t exactly free. Visitors were bombarded with ads, both pop-ups and banners, some of them so largethat the visitor couldn’t even tell that our website was underneath it. In addition, visitors were placed on a spam e-mail list that added insult to injury. In the good old days, freepages were actually free and I am grateful that they gave us the opportunity to grow there. However, they were bought out by MyFamily.com, which is dedicated to the idea that you can make a buck or two on genealogy. They soon began charging us to access our own family trees, which they placed onto Ancestry.com without even asking. When we started in 1996, we were just a group of cousins who wanted to share our research and I am delighted to say that, even though we’ve grown by leaps and bounds, we still have the same philosophy. It is my hope that the only brick walls we run into are in our family trees and not our wallets.
So I’m breaking out and I’m taking you with me. I hope you don’t mind. I hope you don’t miss the non-stop pop-up windows. I hope you don’t miss the banner advertisements. I hope you don’t miss the spam from Ancestry.com promising to solve all your problems if you just send them your credit card number.
I had planned to do this much later when I could afford to get my own server. Right now, I simply bought a domain and paid a service provider to host our site. It is a little lower cost than it will be when we have our own server. It is limited in size to 4 gigabites. Believe it or not, we’ve grown that big. As a result, I haven’t completely brought everything over. I am still trying to make everything fit. I haven’t managed to get our Family Album on our new site yet, but hope to soon.
You might also wonder where our search engine has gone to. Honestly? I can’t get it to work on this server. Having to write my own code is one thing, but getting the server to recognize it is another. In short, I am still working on it.
In the meantime, please take a look around. Let me know what you think. If you see any broken links or errors, please let me know. This is your site as much as it is mine and I need all the help I can get.

                      • April