From a small acorn...

Lots of news and lots of updates on the way in the next few days.

But first, an important item of business. One of the difficulties in maintaining this site is the amount of time it takes to post photographs that people send me, keep family contacts updated (which I haven't been doing), and keep up on the latest family news. It requires far too much manual intervention.

In order to help make all of the above much easier and keep everything more organized and updated, I've created a new Doughty 500 page at My Heritage.com. You can access it at:

www.doughty500.myheritage.com

There is A LOT we can do with this site. So far, I added the photos from this year's 500 that Brendan sent me. You can easily upload your photos too or import them from other photo sharing sites like flickr, Picasa, webshots, and photobucket. I will be adding more albums and more photos shortly. If you do upload photos, please try to put them in the correct album "2007 Doughty 500" for example.

Another nice feature is the family tree. I just started this so there are very few names right now. Please go in and add as many as you can. You can also include e-mail addresses for people and their birth dates.

There are also places for a message board, a calendar, polls, and even recipes. Yes, finally we can share recipes! I understand that David makes a mean apple brown betty. The one thing that don't currently offer is video file sharing, but I'm sure Etrayu will let us know the links to the clips he posts on You Tube.

Anyway, go there take a look and let me know what you think. I'm also going to send an e-mail invite out to some of you to join up too. The current plan that I signed up for is free, but limits us to 15 people which obviously won't work. If this is something we want to stick with (and I think it is) we'll have to sign up for an upgrade. For $5 a month we can get 250 members, a gig of storage, and a face recognition tool included. A bargain indeed.

If this new site works out, it may eventually be able to replace the current Doughty 500 site. For now, I'm going to keep them both active. Please let me know if you have any questions.