Recently Rusty Robinson, R&R’s co-founder, has been writing a number of the blog posts. It is wonderful to see his creativity and his love of vocabulary used to express thoughts related to our enjoyment of preserving and sharing history. Frankly, I could get my feelings hurt, as the number of positive comments made by subscribers has been most upbeat and voluminous. That one achievement in 2015 is indeed most gratifying!
There have been many more rewards in 2015; the explosive usage of the site itself, adding thousands of pages, making friends around the country who share and understand our vision of preserving history one address at a time, and the pleasure received from R&R’s users when they find information on R&R’s pages having eluded their grasp for decades. But the year has also brought significant technology challenges. In October R&R was hacked and thousands of its pages remain broken. We sincerely hope these links will be completely repaired very soon. And it has been difficult to face the fact that R&R is misunderstood by so many users. We often get requests for the price R&R charges to post images and family histories — it is free!
Roots and Recall remains a website focused on linking information to specific addresses. Its ability to link data and events is simply mind boggling, and all the volunteers who continue building its pages remain involved because we all care about preserving the past for everyone to enjoy. No, it is not perfect, and we remain technologically challenged, but as of January 2016, Roots and Recall doubled its usage in the past year. It is astonishing that some 140,000 pages were read on the site, and that doesn’t begin to count the number of blog subscribers, Facebook users, and individuals who enjoy R&R on other social media platforms.
Keep enjoying Rusty’s musings, as I do, and we will continue working hard to answer questions and bring new digital history to life on Roots and Recall. We thank you for being an engaging audience and we appreciate your enthusiasm.