Wow – Time seems to speeding up don’t you think. Its been a whole year since my last contribution. Sadly no-one took up my request for a guest blogger so you are stuck with my rantings.
This time last year I was getting over the shock of losing my partner and the rest of the year was acted out on a day to day basis. Family visited but unforeseen circumstances meant I had to miss the annual meet up in Swindon which I understand went well although numbers taking part were less than other meet ups, but not unexpected under the exceptional circumstances we have all been living under these past two years. Things seem to be getting back to normal now and like influenza, Covid is nowhere near to being eradicated. We are all beginning to learn to live with it and changing our lifestyles and routines to keep us all as individuals as safe as we can. Naively I had thought I had been one of the lucky ones who had avoided the contagion, however it hit me like a wrecking ball just after the New Year and I had not been out of the house since Christmas Eve. Sadly for me early in December of 2021 I cam home from work to start the weekend and the following day I had a panic attack and apart from Christmas Eve I have not left the house since. I am at the point of having to decide whether to go back to work and force myself to face the anxiety issue or to retire again. The good thing to come out of the situation is that I have been able to start catching up with some website work.
Anyway less of my woes. How to move forward………
I would welcome ideas how we can improve the website. One thing we have managed to sort are the galleries for parish pages. Previously these were just a link to Google Photo galleries. This was restrictive in that we could not effectively sort images within a gallery without a long winded manual process. Now we have an in-house programme which we can maintain easier by careful labeling of images of which we have thousands over the 300 plus parish and information pages. This programme is being set up by John Pope who is working hard to transfer each individual gallery to the new programme. We expect this to be completed over the next couple of months.
Richard Cresswell is also looking to find a programme on the lines of paid websites to allow our users to add a very basic family tree to their profiles which can be viewed by others. We would think that we would only include name, date and place of birth, baptism, date and place of marriage, date and place of death. We have looked at a few plug-ins but none seem to meet our requirements and site compatibility.
We still need people to take on parishes and build on the information added. I know I have a backlog of submissions to get through but am working on it but I can only do so much. I am working on these on a rota system based on date received and where one submitter may have sent in a large amount only a few items at a time are being added. All this takes time as the submissions need to be formatted and checked under copyright and privacy laws. If anyone has some free time and has an admin/clerical background and can commit to a certain amount of time on a regular basis I would be glad to hear from you. Since the project is internet based you could be anywhere in the world to help out. With Zoom and Messenger it is workable.
Another thing we are looking at is the login system. Over the last few months we have been made aware of many issues where people are unable to login with their user names and passwords especially where they have not used the site for a period of time. Please bear with us (and yes I had to look up whether it is bear or bare).
This years meet up is being currently being planned – for details please check the Facebook page. Amanda Wood-Woodley is once again arranging this. Once things have been finalised I will add details to the home page of the website too.
The website as you are probably aware is run by volunteers and is funded by user donations. We all owe the donors a great amount of thanks as without this income we would not be able to keep the website running. At present we have enough money in hand to keep the site running for a few years, however if we need to purchase plug-ins to improve the site then those funds will begin to dwindle. If anyone wishes to donate then details of how to do so may be found on the home page of the website.
With the weather improving I realise people will be out and about catching up on research by visiting archives, churches and other places of family history interest. Just remember that Covid is still out there so please be wary and stick to any local requirements to keep not just yourself, but all of us safe and well. If you are planning a field trip somewhere there is a guide and checklist available on our website. It is quite comprehensive and has been compiled from numerous sources including site users own experiences. For example one member (sadly no longer with us) was out and about taking photographs of headstones is churchyards and cemeteries for a military project. He was working alone and visited a remote churchyard. During his wandering amongst the headstones he slipped and badly injured his leg (broken in two places) . He then realised that he had left his phone in his car and was unable to call for assistance. Luckily for him a wedding was to take place in the church the following day and the churchwarden arrived an hour or so later to open up for flower arranging and last minute checks and was able to call an ambulance, had the wedding not been taking place, our colleague would have been left stranded and who knows what may have happened.
