Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Joy Fisher, Speaker at Family History Day

Please welcome Joy Fisher as a speaker at Family History Day at the California State Archives.

Joy Fisher is an Engineer by training and has been using computers for nearly 50 years. She became interested in genealogy four decades ago. Searching for ways to use the computer to assist in doing genealogical research, she became a sysop [administrator of a computer bulletin board] for a genealogy bulletin board back in the early 1980's.  She began translating and transcribing Russian church records in the early 1990's. These records were uploaded to an experimental server and made available via FTP (before the age of browsers).

Joy was on the Kentucky (KY) mailing list when Jeff Murphy announced his small Muhlenberg County web site and USGenWeb was born. She started web sites for two KY counties soon after and has been part of USGenWeb ever since.  She is the founder of SDGENWEB, the South Dakota state pages for USGenWeb, and maintains several county web sites in Illinois, South and North Dakota.

Since its inception in 1996, Joy has been a part of the USGenWeb Archives. The Archives has steadily grown from a few text documents to almost 2 million text files and over 5 million photographs and document images.  She can be reached by email

Joy Fisher will be presenting an Introduction to the USGenWeb Archives.  Learn about this all volunteer managed website of public records transcribed and made accessible by county and state.  Records vary by state but typically include transcriptions of such records as census, marriage bonds, wills, obits, and tombstones.  Images are also available such as maps and penny postcards.

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