2018 April « The Cousin Collector

Kathryn Allison Rails Main

Mary Frances Rails Sturgeon (1947-2015)

Mary Francis Rails Sturgeon [photo from obituary], buried in Savannah Cemetery, was born in St. Joseph, Buchanan County, Missouri on March 6, 1947 and died in Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri on November 29, 2015. Her obituary states only that she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Elsie Allison, but does not name her parents.

A bit of digging and piecing indicates her parents were Louis Keith Rails and Kathryn Allison, daughter of Benjamin Richard Allison (1886-1962) and Elsie Ethel Waggoner (1891-1985). Benjamin and Elsie had at least six children and we’ve been able to trace all of them — except, of course, Kathryn.

Kathryn is mentioned in all of her family members’ obituaries we’ve been able to find as “Kathryn Main,” living in Kansas City. Unfortunately, other than this, we’ve not been able to find out . . . [Yes! There’s more!]

Behaving Badly

All of my efforts to date to get a handle on the bots and site scrapers can only be classified as an epic fail. They are determined and they are legion and they are automated. And they consume alarming amounts of bandwidth.

In the past, I tried requiring user registration for the TNG section of this site, but that wasn’t working. If registration was open, I was deluged by spammers. If registration required administrative approval, it never failed people wanted “in” while I was sleeping. Or working. I do sleep and work. 🙂

So, in a bit of a comprise, I’ve settled on requiring a login BUT it’s sweet and simple. You don’t need to register! Just follow the instructions on the login page and you’re in in the time it takes to type ten characters. Let’s you in and hopefully keeps them out.

Since I implemented . . . [Yes! There’s more!]

Rootsweb Mailing Lists

While Rootsweb itself has been down more than it’s been up for a couple of years, the mailing lists have been a mess for a lot longer than that. They’re active again, it appears, but in what way, shape or form remains to be seen.

The mirrored emails from the message boards in the past have been stripped to the point of being illegible. Whether or not they will even be mirrored anymore I haven’t been able to tell. Have you?

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