|
Disclaimer In some cases third party software is required to read some files on this site. For example, Adobe PDF reader is required for some files such as the cousin catcher and Betty Smith's genealogy. This reader is used by the federal government and many agencies for the fast secure downloading if large files and documents. Adobe PDF ® is an abbreviation for Adobe Portable Document Format. Persons such as your web keeper must buy to software to encode or format a document in PDF format. The reader is available without charge to users who need to read these documents. Many family web sites are hosted on "free" web space or use what your webkeeper considers sites that invade your privacy. While sites such as Geocities and Yahoo may appear safe, your webkeeper would rather not take a chance on anything but commercial web hosting consuidered not invasive of your privacy. Further, we do not link to sites sponsored by those we do not trust. My commercial domains include: http://www.smithassoc.com/a12.html
There may be persons in our family more qualified than I to serve as keeper of the web. Since no else stepped forward and do so, David Son of Hugh is your web keeper.
My background in engineering technical writing, historical research and graphic arts biases me to tell the unvarnished truth and strive for excellence in image quality. The web structure is simple. One pressing project is to organize the site by the three branches, Lee John and Homer, My background in authoring engineering reference works is evident in using simple explanations and striving for accuracy—often at the expense of not pleasing everyone. For example, if a request is made to remove a prior marriage or not post a marriage of a sibling to a person of non-white ancestry perhaps with a family photograph, that request is not honored. This site is color blind. Likewise, if some family commits a grievous crime against another and persists in spreading lies that are hurtful, they may be asked in this web space to set the matter right in keeping with Christian Principles. Our family has strong evangelical Christian roots. Your web keeper is a conservative Christian. My father and mother Martha Eleanor Koch were married at the age of 30. Father received instruction in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church and was given water baptism and confirmed his Christian faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. As a Christian, your web keeper strives to avoid putting offensive material on the web site. There are many ways tactfully to tell the truth--not everyone will be happy with the best efforts as one cannot rewrite history. Like Leonard Smith, my preference of churches in any town would be based on the effort the church to which I might belong would be based on the Christ centered outreach rather than fine points of doctrine. We have many Baptists, Methodists and others in our fellowship—we can worship our Savior together. Using the Site Most family members have Internet access. You are encouraged to save the photographs using your Internet browser. They are formatted in a fast loading JPEG compressed format. Some documents and group photos having extremely good detail and also available in a larger more detailed by clicking on the title. For example, documents such as Michael's military discharge are downloadable as good resolution compressed JPEG files well over 2 MB in size. Some document scans and The four by five inch press camera scans are 74 MB in size. The scan of Michael's German discharge is well over 100 MB. These are preserved in Tagged Image Interchange Format (TIFF) and are available on compact disk by contacting the web keeper Privacy No information is gathered concerning who accesses this web site or how often it is accessed. It is on commercial web space which does cost money. The web keeper prefers to pay out of pocket rather than use "free" web space to preserve privacy of the family members who use the site.
The Future This web site is a registered domain www.smithreunion.org and is paid several years ahead at this writing. At some point in the future, someone will need to assume the duty of maintaining and paying for this site if it is to continue. This site is intended as a way of keep in touch with our family members understanding our history and maintaining family traditions.
David Alkire Smith Click Here To Send E-Mail To David Alkire Smith your Web Keeper - all comments are welcome © 2001- 2006 All Rights Reserved |