If haven't visited the Carver Family website recently, you might not have noticed the new look and feel that resulted from a change in theme.  I liked the old theme and kept it around for several years, but it began showing it's age and wasn't adaptable to new technologies like tablets and smart-phones.  I hope you like the new look which I tried to make easier to read by increasing the default font size.

An interesting new source of information about Virginia history has recently become available (still in Beta) at Encyclopedia Virginia.  The encyclopedia contains an article about Captain William Carver of Jamestown that will be of interest to Carver family researchers.

Billy, Rhonda and Will are hosting this year's family reunion at Hells Gate State Park in Lewiston, Idaho on July 23rd, 2011.  See the attached PDF file for information about reservations or call one of the following numbers.

208-413-0150 Billy
208-553-6926 Rhonda
208-413-1727 Will
Phone: 208-413-6153
wrwilson3@cableone.net

Karen and I returned from our trip to Europe on Sept. 30th. During our trip we spent a week in Schaafheim, Germany exploring the nearby towns and collecting genealogy information. On this trip, our focus was on the town of Altheim which we had determined was the home of our Peter Kreh and his family. Before leaving home, I had written to the pastor of the church in Altheim telling him we would be arriving and asking for his cooperation in accessing the church records. Much to our surprise when we arrived, we found that he had given our request to Ms. Anne Tuchlenski, a genealogist familiar with the Altheim church records. By the time we arrived, she had prepared a report tracing the Kreh family back an additional five generations and over a hundred years to 1609. We had to pay 250 euros, but the money is going to a good cause, the restoration of a baptismal fount for the Altheim church that is dated from 1230 AD. Mirko and Elsbeth Kreh were also very helpful in explaining the report and then finding the link to the Schaafheim Kreh family tree. Mirko was pleased to find we share a common ancestor, making us members of the oldest and 'best' Kreh tribe.

For months as I scanned my daily server logs, I've watched the hackers poke and prod looking for an opening, so far unsuccessfully.  After returning from our trip to Europe, I've been busy working on a plan to upgrade the website to make it more secure.  This is the result of that effort and is only the start of the planned changes.

After debating the issue for some time, I finally decided it was safe to put the genealogy database on-line, but this time I'm hiding all information about living individuals, including their name. This has the downside of also hiding some individuals who have passed on, but the date of their death is unknown. In this case, they are assumed to be living until age 100.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to this article on Electronic Medical Records.

My experience comes from years working in the telecommunications industry and then later moving into computer networking.  When I started, AT&T (not the current company but the old Ma Bell) was firmly in control of the telephone industry.  They set the standards and decided what services were available in the marketplace.  Life was simple.  As a designer, all you had to do was make sure your product provided one of the authorized services and met the appropriate standards, and you could be assured you could sell the product anywhere in the US and it would work. 

After a year and a half of being off-line due to a server failure, the Carver Family website is now back on-line.  The Genealogy section has not yet been recovered and with the recent revelations about guessing a person's Social Security Number based on the date and location of their birth, I'm having second thoughts about restoring it at all.

Occasionally I scan the Internet searching for new information about individuals in our family tree.  Last week I tried using the Ask search engine because they have been running TV ads about their new and improved search.  One of the entries of interest was an article about Karl Kreh in a series of biographies on RootsWeb.  I don't believe Karl fits into our family tree, but represents another branch that immigrated from Germany in the 1800's.  I'm posting the entry here for future reference.