SPRINGDALE : Web site links people to ancestors
Posted on Monday, September 8, 2008
SPRINGDALE — The recent mention of the online photo archive “DeadFred” on NBC’s The Today Show represents a 10-year rise from the humble hills of east Washington County to the limelight of New York.
Based near Sonora, Dead-Fred is the creation of a researcher with Tyson Foods Inc., who in 1998 was off from work sick with encephalitis and had plenty of time to scan and upload dozens of old photographs. But archive founder Joe Bott quickly outgrew the America Online page he was using, and in 2000 enlisted the help of Vulcan Creative Labs, a web-design firm based in Springdale.
Thus was born DeadFred, named irreverently after King Frederick III of Prussia. The Web site quickly was upgraded to support remote photo uploads from site users, and now contains more than 84, 000 records. The hefty collection is among the largest online family history photo archives, and its Internet presence is strong enough to merit mention on national broadcasts like Today.
The latest national plug boosted visitation to the point that the site repeatedly crashed Aug. 29.
“Thousands and thousands of people came to the site all at once,” Bott said. “The site went crash, up, crash, up. We had 300, 000 page views. If we hadn’t gone down, we would have had much more than that.”
The core purpose of Dead-Fred is to provide a photo “reunion” between the living and their deceased ancestors. A reunion occurs when someone logs on, types in some basic search details and then finds a picture that was previously not known to exist.
DeadFred lists 1, 377 confirmed reunions, and with more than 70 million Baby Boomers coming of age, and with a huge, undocumented photo inventory still in play, Bott expects many more.
“What I’ve learned is that every family has 1, 500 photos, and when people die off, they are either sold, given away or thrown out,” Bott said. “Most people over 40 start to migrate to the past.”
DeadFred has a few rules: Photographs can’t be risqué, they must have been taken before 1965, and the subject can’t be alive.
“They have to be in the happy place,” Bott quipped.
The Web site grew out of Bott’s passion for old black and whites. Having been a photo collector since the 1960 s, he had a substantial archive — gleaned from flea markets, yard sales, antique stores and from donations — by 1998, when he bought a suitcase full of photographs at a Minnesota antique store that was going out of business. With the impulse purchase, Bott crossed the line from treasure seeker to archivist, and the photos become the foundation of DeadFred.
The site, which is free, can be found at www. deadfred. com. Upon request, Bott and the many contributors to Dead-Fred send reunion photographs to family members.
Genealogist Megan Smolenyak posted a photograph on DeadFred a few years back because she wanted to know the identity of the children in a class play.
She posted the photograph in the mystery section along with the last known owner of the photograph, her grandmother, Beatrice Agnes Reynolds Shields.
“I just kind of put it up there and forgot about it,” Smolenyak said. “About six months later I got an e-mail.”
The message came from a branch of Irish cousins on her mother’s side that she had never met. The keywords that conjured the photo were “Reynolds,” which identified the past owner, and “Jersey City” for the location. Smolenyak never learned the names of the kids in the picture, but she gained much more.
“I found a bunch of distant cousins,” she said. “It opened up a whole new chapter in my family history. This is a branch that had stumped me forever, so it was a massive bonanza.”
As a genealogist, Smolenyak is a repeat visitor to DeadFred. Easy to use, frequently updated by a national clientele and with a good reputation in the family research community, DeadFred has gained traction in the vast Web universe.
“It’s a high-traffic area,” Smolenyak said. “It’s been up for a while so it’s got volume.”
Bott and his Web site might have been overwhelmed a long time ago had he tried to do it all alone. But Bott has plenty of help.
Laurie Bott, his wife, bags and tags all photographs and stores them in sequential order on the bottom floor of the couple’s split-level home. Jeannette Balleza writes and edits DeadFred’s copy and promotes the site.
Amanda Shertzer is the programmer who built, maintains and periodically upgrades Dead-Fred.
When a user uploads a photograph and its related information, DeadFred automatically reads the entry and sorts the data.
After a short inspection to ensure that the information is accurate and that the photograph is acceptable, all Bott needs to do is push a button and the latest photograph flows into the database.
Eric Huber, meanwhile, is redesigning the Web site for the fourth time.
“You can keep photographs there, but you have to keep people coming back,” said Huber.
Oftentimes when a photograph is discovered by a researcher, Bott receives an appreciative e-mail, or in rare cases, a jubilant phone call.
“It’s absolutely a wonderful feeling,” he said. “You can’t feel that good 1, 377 times, but there is a warmth there, to know that you’ve accomplished something.”
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