User talk:Penshurst

Welcome Lyndsey-better late than never! I'll work on image loading this week for your first group of pages. Glad to have your experience on board for Kent and East Sussex. Hopefully FamilySearch technical problems are now behind us and anyone joining using a FamilySearch account will not have the same problems. Crescunt

Lyndsey, the recurring server issue seems to end on weekdays around 8 a.m. Utah time! I was able to complete the edits you wished for East Peckham, Kent and both internal and external links are working albeit with some server slowdown in the last couple of hours, the desired link does eventually appear. Like Ivor and yourself I encountered the problem 6 hours ago on his page and either there was a server failure or maintenance in progress. Ivor's page has changed appearnce since he first encountered the problem, the internal links now appear correctly on the page. Hopefully he will be able to add the external links now. It does appear that from the outset FamilySearch has thrown technical problems at you; 3 weeks to get the system to accept your sign in and then technical problems regularly on contributions! Crescunt 16:54, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Lyndsey, the recurring server problem on a New Year's Day morning is preventing me working and unless we want to work in a Utah weekday time scale when server issues seem to be overcome I think we have to consider parting company with this project.

I have discussed the various issues surrounding the Surrey parishes with a number of people working in the local archive or in London Metropolitan Archive. The present inclusion of gazetteer entries purporting to be parish history, the 1851 cut off for Anglican parishes, the prescriptive parish page layout, catalogue deficiency issues and technical failings are all factors which guarantee frustration for local genealogists and archivists. It does appear that the wiki is being formed with a USA centric approach to provide information for users of the Family History library rather than for an international online research audience and USA moderators and FamilySearch staff unfamiliar with English archive material are a further obstacle. Whether there is any awareness of the alienating effect on FFHS groups and AGRA members who have sought to contribute is doubtful; when a moderator cannot spell correctly a major city in an English county town and is offensive about the contributions made by a substantial group of UK genealogists it is understandable that in various counties there is now reluctance to be involved or withdrawal of contributions. FamilySearch seems to be blissfully removed from work in counties and archives; lacking a UK based team which might overcome many of the problems.

It does not assist that FamilySearch is so fragmented and so is the response to "email support@familysearch.org" I am inclined to leave well alone now. Crescunt 10:43, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Lyndsey I have encountered the FamilySearch server problem again today so contributions will be extremely limited. I will try later in January but agree that until FamilySearch can provide a reliable server any contributions we might care to make are going to be frustrated. Phil makes good points that the desire here seems to be a resource for US visitors to Family History Library and Centres as an improvement on the chaotic film presentation offered at present. In East Kent we find numerous indexing issues arising from wrongly cited parishes arising from failures to use microfilm accurately. The catalogue presentation differs between the "classic" version of the familysearch.org site and the current one and in any event historically the catalogue contains errors arising from the microfilming descriptions. This has been known virtually from the initial release of copied microfilm to archives and individuals in previous decades but remains as a systematic problem. As we know there are a handful of genealogists at FamilySearch who are aware of English Genealogy and they are unfortunately not responding to the Support queries in the first instance so that route is fraught with difficulty. Although the intention to publish record material and to index is well intentioned the quality of FamilySearch offerings leaves a good deal to be desired. I feel effort is better spent in Wikipedia or in the county FHS and online transcription work like OPC rather than here Ps1964 08:14, 2 January 2012 (UTC)