Sunset at Gowanus Bay

Sunset at Gowanus Bay
Sunset at Gowanus Bay, Henry Gritten, 1851

Saturday, June 9, 2018

The Status of Brouwer Genealogy in 2018

Occurrences, some beyond my control, has prompted a need for a post covering the status of Brouwer Genealogy. We are now midway through 2018, and Brouwer Genealogy has been online at blogger since July 2011. Since inception 579 posts with numerous links to external pages have been posted.

Many linked pages found throughout the posts, pages and in the column on the right, including various genealogy databases and PDFs are hosted by RootsWeb's Free Pages. That service has now been down since the fall of 2017. As of this writing RootsWeb's last update (dated March 6, 2018) has offered no reason to be optimistic that these links, databases and PDFs will be back online soon, if ever at all. Replacing all of the links found on Brouwer Genealogy would be a time consuming endeavor that I have little time and less desire to take on. I will however, make an attempt to screen through the posts and make an effort to repair at least some of, what I consider, to be some of the more important posts. I will try to place linked documents elsewhere online. Doing so, however, requires that I still have an offline copy to use (I still have no access to the files and pages I placed online through RootsWeb). In many cases I no longer have a copy myself.

One PDF that has been repaired is "New Insight Into the Origins of Adam Brouwer." It was previously posted using RootsWeb Free Pages, that link is dead, and it is now online at the Internet Archives. Here you can download the document as a PDF or a few other formats. The link is available on the right, under Brouwer-Brower-Brewer Links as "Origins of Adam Brouwer." I will see what I can do with other links to PDFs found throughout the posts on Brouwer Genealogy, but as alluded to above, this will take time. If there is a particular document that you would like to see, please use the Comments field for this post, or e-mail me, and I will see what I can do about replacing it. I can't promise that it can be done, but you're free to ask.

With regards to the Brouwer Genealogy Database, and some of the other databases (New England Brewers, Brewer-Lanier Database, etc.) they are lost until or unless RootsWeb restores them. I have no way to otherwise publish them online without incurring a monetary cost, and I have no intention of doing that. In the meantime I will be removing the links to these databases from the column on the right. If the databases are restored, I'll restore the links. Removed as of today are:

Brouwer Genealogy Database
About the Brouwer Genealogy Database
Brewer Families of New England
Images (links to images stored elsewhere, some of which are still found within posts on this website and so are still available. It was in essence an index of those images)
William B. Bogardus Collection (this linked to a page of links of individual documents some of which are still accessible, while others are not. It was in effect an index page)
Brewer-Lanier Database
Y-DNA Results (a chart at the Brewer DNA Project hosted by Family Tree DNA. It is accessible to members of the project through the Brewer DNA Project website) 
Archived of the Holland Land Company (this page was at New York Heritage Digital Collections but is no longer found)
Family Tree DNA (essentially a redundant link, please use the Brewer DNA Project link above)
My Other Websites, which included Descendants of Alice Freeman Thompson Parke, Drake Genealogy and Drake in Devonshire (all are lost unless RootsWeb Free Pages restores them).

I'm sorry for the loss of so much data and documents, but most of it is beyond my control. I will soon follow this post up with another that will point to some remedies and alternatives.

BGB 580

5 comments:

  1. Chris,
    I want to take a moment to thank you for all you have done to contribute and disseminate to Brouwer Genealogy. It is tragic that your site (and many others) has gone down and represents a hard to quantify loss of information. There was information on your page that was not found elsewhere. I can only compare it to a real life fire at a courthouse.

    Is there anything people can do to help encourage RootsWeb to continue to restore their pages?
    --Steve Eustis

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    Replies
    1. Steve, if you go to the RootsWeb Update page that I placed a link for in the post, scroll down to just before the Update: January 9, 2018, there is a link called "Care to share your thoughts with us?" There is a field at the bottom of some questions designed to collect data that is titled "Anything you would like for us to improve about your WorldConnect/RootsWeb experience?"
      Other than that I know of no way to contact anyone at RootsWeb

      Delete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My name is David Boyd. My mother's maiden name is Barbara Brewer. Her father (my grandfather) was Rossell M. Brewer, his father was Elder R. Brewer.

    Are you looking for descendants of Elder R. Brewer?

    Reference the blog post on January 5, 2017 ... "Also on page 5 is mention of Abram and Ann (Elder) Brewer from "History of Warren County, Ohio" (this Abram is a descendant of Adam Brouwer). More on the Elder family (pages 5-6). "

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David, I'm personally not looking for any descendants of Elder R. Brewer. Generally I stay away from 20th century genealogy and leave that up to immediate family members. So, if you are looking for other close cousins from recent generations you may want to add a comment to that effect to the January 5, 2017 post.

      Delete

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