Becoming a COGenWeb Volunteer
 How Can You Participate?
One thing COGenWeb volunteers have in common is a desire to share valuable genealogical and historical information with others. Being an COGenWeb volunteer may be done on several different levels.
County Coordinators:
The county coordinator is the foundation of the COGenWeb. Our County Coordinators (CC) manage & maintain the county web sites. Our CCs come from different backgrounds, are all ages, and live anywhere there is access to the internet. The only prerequisites to volunteering as a county coordinator in Colorado, is having a sincere interest in the genealogy of the county you coordinate, and the ability to use basic HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to maintain a website. Additionally, our volunteers provide basic assistance to researchers, locate & transcribe data, and format data submitted by other contributors.
Learning website maintenance is easier than it may appear to be. One you join our team, when you have questions, there is always someone who is happy to share tips or help.
Go here for some links to help you learn HTML
There are also web design programs out there that can help you design your websites. Adobe Dreamweaver is the gold standard, but can be a little confusing and overwhelming to learn at first. Microsoft has Expression Web, which may be a little easier for you to learn. Both programs have extensive, free, online tutorials to help you and will do much of the behind the scenes html coding for you.
The county page requirements for the COGenWeb Project are listed on The COGenWeb Guidelines and Procedures page.
If you are interested in adopting a Colorado County, visit our county site page. If a county is available, email our State Coordinator. If the county you want is not available, will add you to our wish list.
Information Gathering:
- You can volunteer to gather information from your county, or counties close to you. If you do not have internet access, you can get copies and mail them to the county coordinator via snail mail.
Just contact the CC for that particular county.
- Lookups from local sources or from written material.
- Volunteer to do research in public records that are available in the area where you live, or
from books, etc, available to you.
- To Volunteer for
"Information Gathering," Transcribing, or to do Lookups, Please contact either the Individual County Coordinator or one of the Assistant Coordinators.
Special Projects:
We have several Special Projects in the works that can use some help: Take a look at the items below, and you may find some of interest. Right now, we have a need for volunteers to obtain census records from different areas and old photographs of places and/or people of Colorado. We especially have a need for people that can do translations of documents written in other languages into English.
Transcribers
The Census Project, Tombstone Project, and the Digital Archives Project can always use transcribers.
Typing
County Coordinators are constantly finding new material to post to their county pages, but find they could use some help in getting the material typed up and onto the computer for coding and posting to their pages. You could volunteer to type the material into the computer (at your home, and email the file to the coordinator, that way it is already on the computer, then the coordinator can code it and upload it to the web).
 Walk a cemetery
County Coordinators are always interested in receiving information for their county. You can walk your local cemetery recording the names and dates from the headstones and noting the location of the headstone (plot/gravesite) and submit them to the coordinator for posting. These can also be used in the Tombstone Project. A suggestion: Some people use their local Girl Scout or Boy Scout troops to do this, it makes a great community project for the kids and helps us as well. |
