Also sprach Pat Cotter on 29 May 97 at 13:07 about Germany Genealogy Pages:

Hi, I have taken on the Nordrhein-Westfalen area of Germany for WorldGenWeb. I think I have one of your surnames listed in fact. Anyway, if there is something that I can do in conjunction with my pages that would help the Germany Regional Web pages, I'd be glad to work on it.

My page is now at http://www.rootsweb.com/~cotter/nr-wf

Pat Pat Cotter coordinator for Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine - Westphalia) Germany , WorldGenWeb http://www.rootsweb.com/~cotter/nr-wf

Pat, I feel uncomfortable throwing water on the fire of WorldGenWeb as it surely is a project of good intentions. I simply fail to find much relevance to genealogy in the project and wish that such efforts would be concentrated on the subject we are all about: genealogy. The problem is that such pages already exist for Germany in the regional divisions we set up some three years ago on the German genealogy pages. There certainly is a great dearth of active builders of genealogy pages for the common good. Most pages are simply individual efforts reflecting the owner's interests and family. This changes somewhat in the genweb concept but it should not change away from genealogy. The WorldGenWeb project simply dilutes the available human resources away from the matter at hand. Why are we not working together instead of inventing yet another wheel? If we are to look at your pages for NRW for example, we find a collection of anything and everything that the web search engines might have been able to dig up. Does anybody really care to read the political agenda of the Socialist Party of the Erftkreis on a genealogy page? Examples like this abound. But for what purpose? The net is a wonderful thing but we all know that it contains lots of nonsense that does little but add more web pages to the pot. In genealogical organization we should stay focused a little and not keep inventing the same thing over and over again unless it can somehow add something which did not exist before. For germany I can not see any reason to invent a WorldGenWeb page consortium. We can link to each other but on this side of the fence we would like to stick to genealogy as much as possible and not muddy the waters linking every known site in a region to our pages simply because it exists. It needs to have a genealogical purpose first. We would certainly entertain some discussion on this with whomever is responsible for Germany in the WGW project but so far you are the first to even come forth to acknowledge that regional German genealogical web pages already exist and to offer your co-operation in this effort. I'm sending a copy of this communication to the other webpage creators/maintainers in the official German genealogy pages. Please feel free to pass this on to your own organizational team. Fred Rump PS Since we operate in a team concept I'm speaking for myself but I believe the other members would concur with what I wrote. Fred Rump http://www.k2nesoft.com/~fred 26 Warren St Beverly, NJ 08010 fred@compu.com or 609-386-6846 fred@k2nesoft.com