I have been told in the past, that I have a one track mind. That I am like a bull dog and when I dig my teeth into a project, I do not let go until that project is finished. And while I wear many hats here at U.S. Legacies, whatever project I tackle first thing I the morning, that is the project that I attempt to finish before moving on. This technique keeps my nose to the grindstone and many times I get so absorbed in whatever project I am working on, that I become totally oblivious to other things that need tending to.
Thankfully I have email, postal mail and phone calls to get my attention away from the grindstone and keep me reminded of what our readers and visitors to our web site want. This last month was no exception. As I was going through the tons of email we receive, I noticed an abundance of mail from other countries wanting to know if we would ship our magazine to these countries, or if we would help preserve the legacies of people that live in other countries. These requests inspired me to conduct some research.
I started by looking at the statistics for one of our web sites. I discovered that last month, we had visitors from over 60 countries, viewing ONE of our web sites. I also discovered that not all of the volunteers working with U.S. Legacies, are from America. We have a number of proofreaders from England. We have web designers from Croatia, Scotland, and the Philippines. We also have writers from Canada, Pakistan and Australia, plus we have published stories about families or lifestyles in Canada, Jamaica, Hungary, Pakistan and Germany.
By combining that knowledge with the fact that most of our ancestors came from other countries, I decided that it was time to expand our area of coverage. Therefore, we have officially started a sister organization called Worldwide Legacies. THIS WILL NOT TAKE ANYTHING AWAY FROM U.S. LEGACIES.
This magazine and the U.S. Legacies website will continue to contain stories about Americans, however in addition to selling our magazine to subscribers here in the states, we are also going to start selling the magazine in foreign countries. The magazines sold abroad will be printed in the English language, as well as other languages.
In addition to the U.S. Legacies magazine and website, we will also start collecting stories from other countries and will be publishing them on our sister website Worldwide Legacies.org. Once we obtain enough stories on our sister website to fill a separate magazine, we will begin publishing other magazines for various countries.
This new undertaking will require an enormous amount of new volunteers from all over the world to help conduct research, collect stories and interpret material into different languages. So if you have the ability to translate text into any other language, we can use your help. We are also looking for volunteers that have relatives or family members that live in another country, to assist us in obtaining stories about the historical lifestyles from abroad.
Since we now live in a global society, and so many of our ancestors came here from other lands, I believe that by helping to collect and preserve the memories from other lands, we are helping our own descendants. I also believe that by sharing stories of families, and the history of other cultures, we can help our children and grandchildren to see their neighbors as human beings instead of enemies of the past or future.
So, I have a challenge to all of the vets out there that served in a foreign land. If you have any stories about someone that befriended you while you were serving abroad, we would like to hear about your experiences. If you can remember the persons name, we believe it would make a wonderful gift if we could publish and preserve that story for the children and grandchildren of your friend. U.S. Legacies belongs to YOU, all of our subscribers, volunteers, readers and even the contributors to our web site, therefore I am asking for your ideas, opinions and suggestions relating to the variety of ways we can help share the knowledge and legacies across borders.
In the meantime, by the time you receive this issue, we will be working on our Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas issues, so please send us your favorite family memories that represent the lifestyles in this country also. And don’t forget to send us a photo and story about your grandparents.
Till next time.
Franklin T. Wike, Jr.
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Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. -Eleanor Roosevelt-
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U S Legacies Magazine September 2003
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