A Word From The Publisher

This week we stumbled upon a really interesting web site which we want to share with our readers, especially those whose ancestors immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island. The website, www.ellisisland.org contains a wealth of data about passengers on the ships that passed through between 1892 and 1924. There are records of 25 million passengers available, and since the database went online, there have been over seven billion "hits."

One of our children needed to work on a school project involving ancestry this week, and we were quickly able to locate the passenger records for two of her great-grandparents as well as photographs of the ships and views of the actual ships' passenger manifests. The site is free to use (although you must complete a simple registration form for certain sections).

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The internet continues to change the way people think about information. To those who are teenagers or younger, the Ellis Island web site doesn't seem particularly stunning. But to those of us who are older (some a great deal older) it is nothing short of miraculous to be able to read primary documents that are a century old, right from the comfort of our homes.

In the local newspaper business, the impact of the internet is also very real. Our website, which was initially started as an adjunct to the paper paper, now gets over 300,000 hits a month. In February there were more than eleven thousand unique visitors to the site. These days, the vast majority of the material submitted for publication is sent by email.

Things are certainly changing, and while we believe community newspapers will be around for a long time, these are certainly "interesting times" to be living in.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher