Genealogy Helplist

What is the Helplist?

Thank you, Lorna, Barbara, Beverly, and Caleb, for your feedback.

From the front page of the original website:

The Genealogy Helplist consists of volunteers who are willing to help others by looking up specific items at institutions near them, or help supply other information easily accessible to them.

I've also made available, for reference, a copy of the old Genealogy Helplist Instructions. I assume the new system would use online tools, forms, or templates for the handling of entries and responses, rather than personal email messages.

Primarily this was a resource for a person to look up whatever records existed near where they lived in return for others helping with a person's own research in other parts of the world, where other volunteers lived. This program worked best with a certain "critical mass" of volunteers, where the likelihood of finding a volunteer in your region of interest went up as the Helplist grew. I fear that it may be difficult to build such a community again, though I'm willing to try if there's enough interest.

Theoretically, this could be expanded into a scanning/typing/indexing program, but that would require an even greater time commitment from the volunteers. Perhaps a combined approach would be most effective, with the Helplist serving as a central resource for organizing and conducting such indexing projects where the time and interest is available, while still allowing individuals to do simple lookups of non-digitized information on behalf of volunteers in other parts of the world.

Posted at 11:07AM Jan 08, 2008 by Paul Anguiano in Status  |  Comments[7]

What's next

The Genealogy Helplist was formed a decade ago to provide a forum where people could look up local genealogy resources in their part of the world on behalf of others in different locales, who were expected to provide the same service. It was a powerful, charitable, amazing phenomenon which connected people to information they could never have found otherwise. Credit must be given to Michael Rice who set all of this up in a time when web sites were much less common and much harder to access.

Over time, with an increasing number of volunteers and a greater visibility on the web, the overhead required to maintain it by hand became overwhelming, even with different people handling various parts of the list. Abuses of the system, advertisements, and email address harvesting for spam exacerbated the problem. We also had many episodes of page maintainers who disappeared, taking entire portions of the list with them. Restoring old copies led to even more complaints and change requests for editors who were already hopelessly behind. I regret that I overlooked the problem for so long, but it still pained me greatly to take it down, despite the abuse that started to fill my inbox.

I should point out before I go further that there are still some enduring souls who continue, to this day, to maintain portions of the original Helplist for their particular countries and/or U.S. States. Some of what you can find with a web search is old and outdated, but some of it really does appear to be maintained, and I hope that means it is still useful for those volunteers listed.

The main Genealogy Helplist has been offline for a three years now. Much has changed in that time on the internet, and in the genealogy world in particular. The push to make materials available online has increased considerably and many resources are available, or soon to be available through the internet which we never had before. More advanced software for handling websites is now commonplace, and the means to access those sites has grown up as well, so that we are no longer limited to text-based sites and simple pages in order to reach those with older computers or in libraries or genealogy centers.

In some ways I would hope that major efforts targeting local historical resources be directed at scanning, typing, and indexing them for all to use. At the same time I realize that this process will take many, many years to complete and it will have to be done in hundreds of thousands of locations before a significant portion of the written/filmed records are available in databases and online.

For this reason, there may yet be a place for a volunteer list such as this, but it would have to be a community-driven effort, with a firmer, agreed upon set of standards for volunteering and for receiving assistance. Using the site would require self-registration and changes would have to be done by the users themselves. I don't know how many from the original community are still around or what the interest level will be, so I'm starting with a simple blog to get ideas. This server has forums, a content management system, and other resources which can be activated if we decide to do something with it.

Your turn.

Posted at 02:49AM Oct 19, 2007 by Paul Anguiano in Status  |  Comments[6]