The enthusiastic reaction to this on-line database was not expected by myself.  Somehow it was 'discovered' and it seems everyone shared their 'discovery' with someone else.  I thank you all for the wonderful e-mails, phone calls, letters, faxes, guest book entries, etc.   I have received some very helpful feedback and I hope I managed to get it all incorporated correctly.  I also received a lot of new input.  It was still coming on the cutoff day so I guess that means there will have to be a Revision 2 next year.  I did make an effort to make the descendant coverage more uniform.  Because of this expanded descendant coverage,  I submitted the database to two different 'scrubber' programs to ensure privacy standards were upheld.  Let me know immediately if you find something that slipped through.

This database identifies over 20,000 individuals.  We don't know them all by complete name as yet but we do know they were here, or were someone's spouse, or were someone's child, or were someone's parent.  At the risk of confusing the "Americans", we opened the gate to let the ancestors of the Kiron Kountry immigrants be identified.  The reason for using the term 'confusion' is that our neat little ideas as to how things are spelled gets challenged in a hurry.

For the Swedes, they have the benefit of three extra vowels, all of which have unique sounds.  Because they look like funny 'a' and 'o' characters, and they don't appear on the keyboard, they got dropped when your Swedish ancestor got off the boat.  But the parents in Sweden still have their original names and that is what we tried to capture in the database.  Then, those who jealously guard their 'family name' will be in for a culture shock as they encounter the patronymic naming system in action.

There are extra letters for German ancestery too but I have not had the benefit of delving into german based records as yet so what I recorded here is what I was given by Americans.  Denmark and Norway are like Sweden in having extra characters for their expanded alphabet.  However, the characters themselves are created differently.

As in the original, we emphasize the vitals and eliminated many incidental or trivial 'facts' that always creep into a research type data base.  This kind of information is obviously not consistent across the research database.  Most is of the nature of a 'geographic to time' mapping.   If anyone researching a branch of their family tree thinks this type data may help them, please send me an e-mail.

I have tried to keep the 'navigation' the same as on the original.  However, the sheer size of the name pool is getting to where I may have to look for a 'search engine' to add to the site.  I have been trying to avoid adding 'extras' so as to keep the 'performance' as good as possible especially for those of you who do not have the speediest connections or computers.  If you care to express an opinion, or have a good suggestion, lets hear it.  You may have success with your browsers searching capability.

Right now, the combined Kiron Kountry Library and Gallery sites have grown to well over 50,000,000 bytes.  And we have just begun!