Genealogy’s Top Ten SuperHeroes

Our genealogy community is full of intelligent, kind, and generous individuals. Our community wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for so many folks spending countless thankless hours transcribing, digitizing, writing, teaching, and sharing information! Every volunteer is a hero, but many work so tirelessly behind the scenes without the true recognition due them. These folks are the superheroes.

I’m going out on a limb here, and not taking votes on this (but do welcome comments), and have created the Relatively Curious  Top Ten List of Genealogy Heroes, in no particular order:

• Tom Tryniski, FultonHistory who started out with sharing a huge collection of digitized postcards of the Fulton, New York area, but has since expanded (to put it mildly) and has single-handedly collected and scanned over 28 million newspaper pages.
• Kenneth Marks, The Ancestor Hunt    THE place to look for online newspapers links from all over the world, as well as informative articles on research topics.
• 
  Katherine R. Willson, (http://socialmediagenealogy.com/) for creating and maintaining the “Genealogy on Facebook” List, and the compilation of instructional genealogical videos on YouTube list.
• Miriam Robbins for keeping up the excellent resources pages for historical directories   & newspapers  as well as regularly hosting the inspirational ScanFest
• Cyndi Ingle, for creating and maintaining the original and most comprehensive categorized and cross-referenced list of links for genealogical research, at CyndisList.com
• Roy Hemmat, whose projects of Crafted Knowledge provide free searchable indexes for various military and immigration archives. 
• Stephen Morse, who not only is the architect of the Intel 8086 chip, but has used his technological brilliance to develop some of the best genealogical search engines available, with his One Step Search Pages.   
• Brian Leverich & Karen Isaacson, who thankfully chose to use their technological intelligence for good, and founded Rootsweb Genealogical Data Cooperative, now continuing to reward the genealogy community with their massive and continually upgraded directory of great genealogy resources on Linkpendium.com.
• Randy Seaver  Easily the most prolific blogger in the geneasphere, Randy shares his insights and commentary on all things genealogy, engages us with humor as well as often providing Saturday night genealogy fun on his blog Geneamusings  
• DearMYRTLE – Definitely one of the genealogy community pioneers, Dear MYRTLE, has been online since 1985, and writing since 1995. “]Your friend in genealogy”, inspiration and mentor to many, DearMYRTLE continues to tirelessly support the genealogy community not only through her own many weekly hangouts and study groups, but also, among many  other valuable genealogy-community contributions,  pioneering and encouraging genealogists in the virtual world SecondLife, Genea-Quilters, Crafty Genealogists, and providing the incredibly useful GeneaWebinars website, a well-maintained online calendar of genealogy events and webinars

And the list would not be complete without mentioning volunteers!  Every person who has photographed and shared a headstone online, every volunteer host for a RootsWeb or GenWeb page, every Family History Center director and volunteer, the folks who continue to maintain Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, the board members and elected officers of every genealogy organization who work tirelessly to share their area’s records and information and support their membership, and everyone who has ever transcribed so much as one name for any online project… In short, the selfless, dedicated, and kind members of the genealogy community as a whole, who work solely so that others may find their own ancestors.