General Chat

Does this mean we have to reunite our ggg grandparents? Off to Somerset with a shovel! sorry if its in bad taste I could connect them together before but how on earth do you reunite them? a puzzled Jan x

So annoying! They should listen to us! We're the paying members! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Amy

While the site was down this morning I looked up Genes Reunited on Google. Here's part of an article: Genes reunited As the interest in tracing family history has grown, genealogy websites have sprung up to cater for the demand. Phil Inman and Sean Dodson report Thursday April 29, 2004 The Guardian Ever since the government's attempt to put the 1901 census online collapsed under the weight of 3m hits in three hours, a growing band of specialist genealogy websites has sought to make up the lost ground. Genes Connected is probably the fastest-growing user site. It is a series of family trees put on the site by thousands of amateur sleuths looking for connections with the past. They compile their trees from a mix of fireside chats with relatives, official data from other sites and, when they can't find what they want, the Family Records centre in London. Steve Pankhurst, co-founder of Friends Reunited, puts the success of the site down to its open, democratic policy and lack of stuffy, academic attitudes. "It's one of those ideas that fits the internet perfectly. Until now, there's not been that many sites in the UK. What there has been are research sites that allow you to access old public records. "Where Genes Connected is different is that we are not a research site in the purest sense because our data is not pulled from censuses. The other sites help you get to the information quicker, whereas the idea behind this was to put in the information you know or have pulled from the other sites and share it," he says. The site is free to members who want to find a home for their family tree, but few want to leave it at that. Increasingly, they want to cross- reference with other family trees. And they can, with a search facility that allows users to check if other family trees hold names they are looking for. The only barrier is the £7.50 annual fee that pays for access to other users' email addresses. In the two years since it started, the site has acquired 1m members (though it won't say how many pay the subscription fee) and reckons to hold 11m names of dead ancestors, with some of the 40,000 to 50,000 names added every day stretching back to AD 1200. Michelle Barker, the site's managing director, says the site has fired up a new generation of genealogists. "Prior to the internet it took so much time to physically track down the records. The only people who could do that were the well-off or people who had time on their hands. What the internet, and specifically Genes Connected, is doing is eliminating those barriers. The interest has always been there, but not everybody has always had the opportunity." media.guardian.*co.uk/site/story/ 0,14173,1205375,00.html Is GC becoming full of their own self-importance? Is a mutiny the thing to do now?

I have just noticed we are now Genes Reunited not Genes Connected. oh well GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nat

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