Who Was That Person?

Today I finally got the first Rec2Gen county sub-site online, for Erie County New York. For now, think of it as a skeleton of what I have in mind. You can watch it grow into a full-fleshed behemoth over the next year or two.

Under surnames, click on the A or B and you will see lots of names — but further down the alphabet there is little yet. That is because one of my first projects is an index of the 1870 City Directory for Buffalo. Each day I spend a little under an hour to add another page from the book, a digital copy of which is available online (see the Records section under Buffalo for a link).

One of things I want to do is provide the kind of information that is present in the data, but not easily discovered. For this city directory, for example, I plan to add the capability to search for neighbors of any individual, based on their listed address. It doesn’t do that yet however, that is only one example of a long wish-list that I plan to add as time goes on. In terms of programming it is relatively simple, and will only take a few hours to implement, but it will not be much good until the whole directory is in the database, and that will take a year if I only add 5 pages a week, as I am now. But who knows, maybe I’ll have more time in the future, and can spend longer hours on that project — but I’m not counting on it.