This is an annual report on the Bunker Family Association’s web site and e-mail activities. Our e-mail group at Rootsweb.com remains active with 163 subscribers; not all of whom are members of the BFA. Bette Bunker Richards, our genealogist, is the most active contributor to the group. She often shares links to sites on the internet containing information useful to those researching our family history.
Anyone wishing to subscribe to the list may send an e-mail request to BUNKER-L-request@rootsweb.com with the word “subscribe” in the subject line. Alternatively, some folks prefer to allow the list manager (that’s me) to manually subscribe them. You can send me at an e-mail request at doug.detling@gmail.com and I’ll add you.
Our web site at https://www.bunkerfamilyassn.org is hosted at a large commercial hosting company, and we have obtained certain economies of scale since I manage other web sites. Costs of maintaining the site are stable, though this year there was a dollar increase in the domain registration. We’ve managed to keep the costs at $110 a year with no web data traffic charges. Web site maintenance has been made more efficient through the newest versions of WordPress—one of the most popular blogging software packages used on the internet today.
As another contribution to the association, we have been able to post photographs of interest to BFA members, such as the restoration of the Bunker graveyard in New Hampshire. The photos are accessible through the webmaster’s photo site at http://greencity.phanfare.com.
Another activity of the web master is the production of the CDs Bette Bunker Richards has created on the Bedford and Devon Bunker families. As needed, these discs are producing using masters kept on file on the webmaster’s computer and an HP Lightscribe CD writer. I am working on an extension of Bette’s work on my own line (descendants of Sobriety Bunker). This will be an update of a report printed when I first got involved with the BFA, and my family tree data base extends and corrects some of the work on the Devon CD (errors in the data base were the result of an incorrect link; my great-grandfather was an illegitimate child and the discovery of the incorrect link wasn’t made until the Devon CDs were under production). No matter, all genealogy is a work in progress, and the same will be true when my CD version of the Descendants of Sobriety Bunker is completed in a few months (hopefully this summer).
As soon as that work is completed, I will turn my efforts to making PDF versions of all back issues of the Bunker Banner, which will likely fit on a single CD. If that can be accomplished, BFA President Gil Bunker will have less paper stored. Pricing for the CD has not been determined at this time.
As always, any suggestions may be sent to me via e-mail.