Friday, April 6, 2007

Hall of Randy's Genealogy Heroes

I posted yesterday about my Genealogy Hall of Shame, so I wanted to post about my own Genealogy Hall of Fame.

There is already a National Genealogy Hall of Fame at http://www.ngsgenealogy.org/comhallmembers.cfm. They are selected by the profession based on their life's work serving genealogy - researching, writing, teaching, leading, etc. I greatly appreciate these people who dedicated their life's work to genealogy and family history.

My candidates for my own Genealogy Hall of Fame - I'm going to call it the Hall of Randy's Genealogy Heroes - are those who serve the profession and hobby of genealogy selflessly - they give of their time and knowledge to help others.

The Hall of Randy's Genealogy Heroes includes:

1) People who volunteer at a local, regional or national society - the ones that do the work to make programs and events happen.

2) People who try to help other researchers improve their knowledge and skills - mentors, teachers, writers, etc.

3) The long list of volunteers at the Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness web site (http://www.raogk.org/)

4) The many volunteers who host and manage USGenWeb and WorldGenWeb sites.

5) The volunteers who monitor Rootsweb mailing lists and administer Rootsweb message boards.

6) The people who transcribe, abstract and index records at repositories or cemeteries.

7) The people who rescue family Bibles and other treasures at estate sales or bookstores, and try to hook them up with family.

8) The people working on the FamilySearch Indexing projects.

9) The people transcribing public domain books and/or records for free online posting - people like Janice Farnsworth, Ray Sears, Jane Devlin, John Slaughter, and others.

10) The many people who have done family research over the past 160 years - and documented their research in books, periodicals and web sites.

11) The many LDS people who have entered data into the IGI extracted from primary source documents.

Who else? I am quite sure that I have overlooked many people on my list - please tell me who I should add and I will consider it.

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