Online Tools Would you love to learn about your Ireland heritage and genealogy roots but do not have the time, patience, or money, that it might involve? Here is one answer. Find others who are interested in your project, and let them do the busy work. It is amazing how many people out there have time to burn. Duty jobs, careers where novels can be read on down time, the integration of ongoing internet browsing, or social networking while at effortless desk positions. There are even people out there who are so bored they have nothing better to do than collect other people's genealogy. And they are not even related. Case in point, as detailed in our last article about the resources of perhaps the largest commercial digital archive Ancestry.com, where many of the subscriber trees are created as church projects or by idletime computer geeks, some of whom thrive on "subtly boasting" based on the number of entries in their database. Many of the user indexes are built upon massive numbers of piecemeal family trees through means of the error prone automatic matching system that Ancestry promotes. Another source for this kind of irrational exuberance is Find a Grave dot com. Thousands upon millions of tombstones and burial records are posted by a few hundred volunteers, who vigorously defend their virtual domains as "owners" of the data. In fact the site makes it a point, by styling their pages, to accommodate transfers of caretakership, including the management of flower images, photos of graves, and other memorials often in the form of unsubstantiated family linkage texts. US Gen Web was built with the specific charter of being completely and thoroughly volunteer driven. It claims to be the biggest and fastest growing free information site of text based genealogy information (and now offering free image storage as well). Volunteer lay claim stakes to geographic territories, building State, County, or regional storehouses of compiled textual databases, actual record transcriptions, and researcher referrals. The portal begins at www.usgenweb.org and branches off to each area of interest. Ireland Reaching Out at irelandxo.com is primarily managed by volunteers who serve as "parish liaisons" on behalf of the Loughrea Galway charity enterprise. Each of the some 3000 parishes in Ireland have been portioned to represent and funnel the Irish Diaspora to participate in the electronic communities and townlands of origin, via networking on history and family group interests, which support the homeland. Rootsweb was built as a user-created content open forum, where volunteers can be found by posting threaded message inquiries and topical collaboration. The website claims to host: "many of the largest volunteer genealogy projects on the Internet. Volunteers locate, transcribe, and publish genealogical data and help new users. Through this work they meet other genealogists with similar interests. You will find a listing of some volunteer efforts on RootsWeb's main page and in their website registry. Your own interests may lead you to others." The site was one of the first online, now funded and hosted by Ancestry.com, but still remains free and volunteer driven. List servers for many decades, and now RSS news feeds from bloggers and family history enthusiasts generate enough reading material on Surnames, Local histories, or specific family research, that it is practically impossible to keep up on all the potential avenues of reading pertinent to ones targeted genealogy interests. Community historians, museums, libraries, and heritage centers, have often been instituted with the very purpose of providing you with assistance and resources, and the best of which are key tuned to the heritage of their local families. The library at the Irish American Heritage Center Chicago is one such example on a larger urban scale, and yet maintains an excellent Chicago Irish collection as well as many genealogy help materials from Ireland. By locating and integrating with the passionate hobbiest entrenched in a topic that incorporates your goals, its like having your own private university scholars publishing division in your backpocket or purse. Experts in locating information, those with history analytic skills, and those with knowledge of the local families themselves, form the trifecta ipod of gold. Seek the good fortune to piggyback and coattail off the family histories of many others who are doing more work than we could do in eight lifetimes. Great Aunts, retirees, software programmers, librarians, local history museums, personal internet publishers, armature historians. We are the beneficiaries of a host of indexers, compilers, bubbly and greedy data grabbers, and magical leprechauns of serendipity in genealogical acts of kindness. Let others know what you are looking for, and you might just find the answer where and when you least expect it. =welcome>about>help>back(to"help")>NEXT: here

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