CURRENT STATS Last month: 4649 This month: 4604 New: 129 Left: 99 *Staff removals: 28 *Staff removals are those folks whose e-mail address has been reported bouncing and confirmed or volunteers who, over the course of trying many times, did not respond back to requesters or staff. Staff also removed 48 volunteers from the site due to returns (user/host unknown and Not Accepting Mail from this sender) when the September newsletter was sent out. Kudos for September: 64 (http://www.raogk.org/guestbook/) Most of the time this newsletter covers information that we have been asked about repeatedly over the course of the month. If you feel that you are hearing repeats of the same thing over and over again it is because we are getting messages during the past month that has been covered in past newsletters. Besides the two FAQ areas posted on the site, this is the only way we can communicate with all of our volunteers. So please bear with us with our repeated items. WHERE IS MY LISTING? We have received a few e-mails wanting to know how a volunteer goes about finding their own listing. Our answer is, how would you go about finding a volunteer in another area? If you know you are on the site (if you are receiving this message, you are on the site), then go to the area where you volunteered. Or for those who have volunteered in the USA, there is a search engine to find a volunteer in a county or state and a link to this area is at the bottom of all state pages. If you cannot find your listing, and you are receiving this message, you may be on 'temporary status." TEMPORARY STATUS Everyone has a time in their life where conditions are such that volunteering for a few weeks or months is not possible. For such times we have a condition called "temporary status." This means that your listing remains in the database, however, not viewable to the public. This status can only be for no longer than 3 months, if you need to be away from the site for longer than that, you really do need to completely remove yourself from the site. To place yourself on temporary status, or if you are already on temporary status and want to become active again, you need to go to http://www.raogk.org/change.html and select the link that pertains to temporary status. If you need to be removed from the site entirely, you still need to go to the above link and select the link to be removed. LOOKUPS AND THE LIVING Please folks, do not do lookups on people that are living. If you get a request that you feel may directly cover a person that is still among us -- then you have every right to turn that requester down. This discussion has come up time and time again. I also need to clarify that if a requester is looking for an obit, and that obit contains names of those that survived the deceased, then so be it, that type of lookup up is fine. To break this down further, if you get a request for an obit and the requester indicates s/he are looking for the survivor's names or even a specific person who may still be alive within the obit, that is not done. However, just because a record is in the public domain (such as marriages, divorces, births) doesn't make it 'fair game' for lookups from a RAOGK volunteer. Since these records may be in the public domain, let the requester get it themselves. I have no problem with giving the requester the information on how to obtain the information, but please do not give out that information yourself. RESPONDING TO REQUESTS This topic seems to be discussed in all newsletters. It can't be stressed enough that when you receive a request you *must* let the requester know that you have received the request, if you can honor the request and how long it will take you to do so. When we receive complaints that a volunteer has not responded, we do not take the complaint at face value and instantly remove a volunteer for this reason. We, in turn, write to the volunteer to find out if there has been some problem that has prevented them from responding to the requester. However, our success rate of getting a volunteer to respond back to us is not very good either. A question frequently asked is if a person has no intentions of doing lookups, why do they sign up? To this question, we have no answers. With the new system in place we are running into another bit of a problem. The requesters having typos in their e-mail address, with no way for the volunteers to contact them. This is all the more reason to respond to the request FIRST, then do the lookups. If you spend hours on doing the research on the request and then send the information back to the requester, only to find a bounce message in return, look at the time you wasted and I am sure the frustration level is raised as well (I know mine would be). Be sure to save all correspondence received, so if we should receive a complaint that you have not responded back, when you are contacted you can prove you tried. Which brings up another situation we've noticed this past month. Some volunteers have posted to the Kudos/Guestbook area that they have done research for someone but unable to contact them due to a bad e-mail address. Folks, this is NOT the area to post this information, it will be deleted. We may, in the future, have an area for this type of situation, but we do not have one now. RAOGK APPEARS IN A NEWSPAPER COLUMN Thought you folks would like to read an article written regarding RAOGK and 3 of our volunteers. http://lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/4/8928 THANK YOU Some of you may not hear this enough from the people you have helped, but the staff at RAOGK want to take this time to thank all of you for being such a great group of people. I have always stated that genealogists are the best group of people, ever. Until next month, THE STAFF Bridgett, Michele, Mollie, Val, Bill, Madlyn, Anja and Doc, the Tech Guru