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[4]