Reinventing the wheel

There are lots of family gathering type websites being offered out there. Each has similar offerings of community space, but the problem that I see is that there is no real way to hand it down to the family. If the company that made the software goes under etc. then that's it, they take their marbles and leave. The family loses out. All the work, all the memories, everything gone without recourse. Now to be realistic, that can also happen here since the person currently working on it (me) is a volunteer and this can stop equally at a whim.

The difference is that the first model, there's no real way of taking a snapshot of it to publish in DVD form. It would mean extra work to mirror the data (if even possible) or even just rekey in all the data.

I've always been a man of trying to hold my own destiny so my first reaction is to try to do this on a hosted server somewhere in the world. The data needs to be kept flexible so that it is portable. At some point in time it becomes even more feasible to make and keep a physical server that keeps all the family data, which maybe one day every family has a historian who keeps all the family's information on a small computer the size of a book on their bookshelf.

This week has been an interesting one on this front. Tomorrow I will be getting hosting. I will sign a 2 year contract and register a half dozen domain names. There will be lots of storage space and also lots of monthly bandwidth. The ability to stream video is extremely important to this project and it's one of the reasons that I'm going with this provider.

I have signed up with several genealogy sites to find others that are also looking for Roces family members around the world. In doing some cursory searches, a US Census in the 1910-1930's shows a Roces living in Brooklyn, Massachusetts, and Indiana. Same person? Not sure, but I was very surprised to find the name come up in that area.