Monday, May 17, 2010

History Detectives, Local Style

Wow, the news keeps coming on all the websites and history that our area encompasses, and changes to them. The following news is extremely exciting, because we've been working on resolving this problem for over a year: What to do about losing the Red River Valley history website started by Dennis Matthews, one of the earliest websites documenting my hometown area and surrounding region. It's a long story but in summary Dennis lost his host for the site and all the data is locked on his computer. A fellow expatriate wrote to say this, just this past weekend:
Meant to email you sooner. I am out in Seattle for a graduation and I am trying to set up a meeting with Dennis Mathews to see if I can get a back up of all of his historical data for you on Monday or Thursday of this week.
I wrote back to her to express my delight at hearing this news, and that her inquiry about if the Rootsweb site was still available and a viable option, to reassure her that yes, indeed it was!

The hundreds (probably thousands) of hours Dennis has put in on putting this website up is just amazing. He transcribed historical essays among other documents into web pages that had before only existed in rare hard copy format up until then. We owe him a LOT, and thus are going the extra mile to help him recover and preserve his work...

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