Over to You

The point has now been reached where we need to hope that you, dear reader, are about ready to contribute to the site. The point of all this work I've been doing is, after all, to encourage the House Preston families out there in the wide world to get together on-line so that we can all share our family information.

The site mash-up (as sites like this are delightfully called) was designed and put together from the very start in the hope that people out in the wider world would do more of the work than I will - and not least because once it is under way it should outlive any accidents that might befall me or any other regular contributor. It is built on my own pages, I actually own the pages that are linked into the site, and where payment is needed I make the payments - but under the skin this is all yours rather than mine.

Now the time has come for you to start using it more.

How you can contribute

At the moment, there are several ways you can, and I hope you will, contribute to the site. What I intend to do in this Journal entry is to encourage you to try one or more of those ways of sharing your own information with the rest of the Preston families all over the world.

Let me admit and agree right off, though, that there are several people who have contributed and who I hope will carry on doing so. Some of the ways that have been used are perhaps not as helpful as they might be since they come directly to me rather than to be shared with everyone else.

I do know that, in the UK at least, the way that the Guild of One Name Studies works is a little centralised and traditional. After all, my father did manage the One Name Study group for the Preston Family until his death - which is the reason I have such a vast quantity of paper records that I intend to transfer to the internet as this site builds up.

Unfortunately, tradition seems to be a major thing with the Guild and they still demand that name groups have one person, one postal address and paper records. A shame, in the modern world, and something that I simply don't have the time to deal with which is why I have created the site in the first place.

So that is the first way you can contribute - you can ask me questions. People have done it for a long while since I was always helping my father, especially in the later stages of his illness, to manage the One Name Study group but now I hope they will do it through the site rather than by direct postal or electronic mail.

Asking questions

It is simplicity itself to ask a question about the family: just look up to the top right of the page, where the site navigation is. Where you see the link "Contact the House" just point to it, click and it will use your own email software to let you write me an email.

Simple as that!

Comment on the Journal

For those who don't like to use email and perhaps don't even have an email address, the next obvious way to contribute is to send comments to the Journal itself as Purest Green (Sophia) did to a recent entry.

While the Journal is not intended to be any sort of general discussion group or forum for House Preston, this is the best way to deal with any general comments and points you might like to raise - such as Sophia's comments about the coat of arms shown at the top of this page and the arms shown in one of the Scottish castles associated with the family.

And this brings us to the next way you can contribute.

Pass on information

Using the same email link on the navigation section of the page, you can send me information you might have about the family - such as a description of all the different coats of arms used by the different branches of House Preston (of which there are at least five major ones).

Such contributions can include pictures that you want to see in the Journal though it is much better to use links to pictures that are stored off in the internet cloud somewhere since it will save space in the server we use for the Journal and let us put more into it later. You should make sure that such pictures are likely to stay where they are and - importantly - that you will be allowed to use them.

Don't just assume that the pictures can be used just because they are on the world wide web! That is not the way these things work: ask permission before you use something!

Link to the Journal

Very helpful to us are links to the site - any part of it, including the Journal. If you find something interesting anywhere on the site and you have your own web page, then please include a link to the page you found useful. Obviously, this will happen more and more as we add data to the Family Records, but please feel free to do it now to anything that catches your interest.

One of the easiest ways to add a link is to use the site button, like the one shown here, that you can find on the main page of the House site. It is a simple little picture with a built-in link and a snippet of web page code has been provided that you can just copy from the page and paste into your own page. Simple as that!

Follow the blogging

Finally - for now - you can add your name as one of those who follows this blog (the technical name for what the Journal is). This is the simplest of all the things you can do, since all you have to do is click the link over on the right of the page that says "Follow this blog" and follow the instructions on the screen.

Dead easy - and I hope to see you all adding yourselves to the list of followers over the next month while I go and visit your own pages out there in the internet cloud.

There are more ways you can and (I hope) will contribute to the site, but this has been a brief look at some of the simplest things you can do. So get working all of you! Let's make this site a truly useful resource for every Preston everywhere!