Sunday, July 20, 2008

New Chula Vista Genealogical Society web site

The Chula Vista Genealogical Society (CVGS) has had a web site at http://www.rootsweb.com/~cacvgs2/ for more than five years. In addition to the informational web pages, we had a members' surname search engine, the newsletter archive, informative articles, and a society photo gallery on linked pages.

On Tuesday, 6 July, our web pages disappeared for some reason. Click on the link above and you'll see what I mean. We don't think we made any overt move to edit or delete the pages before or after that date. There is some indication that the site was hacked and suspicious code appears in the source code (thanks to Tamura Jones for finding it!).

In the past week, we managed to collect the home page from the Wayback Machine (http://www.archives.com/) and most of the text pages from Google search cached pages, but we do not have the rest of the web pages that were linked to the available pages. We do have all of the info in PDF and JPG files, and we'll have to rebuild the information base over time.

When this happened, we searched for a contact for Rootsweb to ask why and how this happened. Shirley sent an email to the Rootsweb Review editor and got a response five days later saying to send an email to Accounts@Rootsweb.com, so we have. I went to the Ancestry Technical Support page on 14 July, and sent a request for information about why this happened, and for advice and a contact to determine if there is backup of the pages on the Rootsweb server. Six days later, I've had no response.

Last night, I realized that since the Chula Vista Genealogy Cafe blog is on Google, and the society has a Gmail address (CVgenealogy@gmail.com), therefore we can build a free web site (up to 100 mb) on Google, so I spent several hours last night putting our new site up at http://sites.google.com/site/cvgenealogy/. It's not perfect or complete, but it's there in case somebody needs information about the Society or wants to contact us.

This is a fine time to ask our readers - what would you like to see put on the CVGS web site? What information do you need in order to pursue genealogy research in Chula Vista or the San Diego area?

Please go visit our new web site at http://sites.google.com/site/cvgenealogy/.

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