This is the explanation you will find on Dick Eastman's www.eogen.com for a new online reference service. Eastman says his goal is to build the site's current 270 articles (as of Dec. 13, 2004) to 5,000. Anyone can contribute.
As Eastman says on the site, "The Encyclopedia of Genealogy is created by genealogists like yourself. In fact, YOU can help by adding content: your own knowledge and expertise can help others. If you see anything in this encyclopedia that is incorrect, YOU can change it! If you see anything that is incomplete, YOU can add to it! If you note anything that is missing, YOU can add it! This encyclopedia will succeed because people like you contribute nuggets of information. When enough 'nuggets' are added, the Encyclopedia of Genealogy will become a gold mine."
Topics Eastman suggests for future articles include:
- Information about your local genealogy society
- Immigration records explained
- The details of each decade's census records explained.
- Individual articles on how to research Italian, German, Polish, French-Canadian, Jewish, Black, Indian and other ancestors
Those who have genealogy-related products to sell can also add to the Web site by creating product "announcements" rather than "advertisements." The thing to keep in mind is that all articles contributed to the site are subject to revision by any other contributor. All articles can be reprinted anywhere. "If you want to retain copyright of your words," he says, "please do not post them on the Encyclopedia of Genealogy."
The 270 current entries include alien registration, Ancestral File, azote, blog, bubonic plague, Canadian Federal Census Dates, d'Aboville numbers, distemper, Guild of One Name Studies, linux, Macintosh, mulatto, PERSI, sine prole, Soundex, valetudinary, and Windows, to name just a few. Remember that all these entries are articles about or defining the subject title and have nothing whatever to do with actual ancestors and surnames.
Dick Eastman's journey to highly respected genealogical guru began with a school assignment that prompted him to ask questions about family, and tuned his ear to the stories of Eastman, Dow, and Deabay elders at family reunions.
Along with this growing curiosity about his roots, an early interest in ham radio awakened his penchant for all things electronic, and he was ready for computers almost before they were ready for him. This odd combination of interests came together, and by the early 1970s, Dick was already using a mainframe computer to enter his family data on punch cards.
It was only natural for him to play with PCs and Macintosh computers when the information age invaded households across the continent. He immediately saw new and better and faster ways of researching his family. This was too good to keep to himself, so it's no surprise that the Internet became his playground, where he would exhort others to bring their ancestors into this digitized world.
Dick actually went knocking on the door of a rising Internet star called CompuServe to propose a genealogy forum, a move by which he built a community of family historians over the next 14 years. At the same time, he preached the benefits of technology to an even wider audience of genealogists, including national and international genealogical organizations, and of course, GENTECH, an organization that helped him to spread his message.
For the past eight-plus years, Dick has pursued his mission through an online periodical he writes every week, called simply "Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter."
It is published at least weekly and is well worth a look at www.eogen.typepad.
com.
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