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Minerd.com Celebrates 10th Anniversary - May 7, 2010 |
BEAVER, PA, May 1, 2010 -- The award-winning Minerd.com website – which celebrates its
10th anniversary on May 7 – chronicles the sweep of American history in a way
most Americans do not think about or have easy words to describe. Twice named
one of the nation’s top 10 family websites, and having drawn 1.5 million
visitors since 2000, its perspective is forward-moving in time, rather than
backward. It tells the story of the collective experience of one family through
its many thousands of branches scattered across the United States.
Anniversary logo
In World Wide Web time, the site is virtually in old age.
"Minerd.com is a prototype for families wanting to capture their own personal history set against the broad backdrop of Americana," said Mark A. Miner, the site’s founder and creative force. "It also educates an estimated 50,000 cousins in our diaspora that their ancient roots are in Southwestern Pennsylvania."
Plans
for the anniversary year include a soon-to-be-announced promotional joint
venture with a tourism agency in Pittsburgh, and occasional podcasts from the
founder on a wide variety of topics.
Founder Mark Miner
Over the past decade, Minerd.com has drawn inquiries from 1,000 long lost cousins and genealogy enthusiasts, generally those who Googled a family name and were brought to the site.
Starting in 1791 with original Western Pennsylvania pioneers Jacob and Maria (Nein) Minerd Sr., the site features individual biographies of 1,350 of their descendants in the first four generations of offspring, virtually all born before 1900. Minerd.com also is a photographic gallery of more than 7,900 rare photo images of cousins, their homes and places of work. In comparison, when the site first went live in 2000, it had only 250 biographies and 1,400 photographic images.
The site’s holdings are massive and encyclopedic. Among them are the archives of early Minerd-Miner reunions dating to 1913, and also reunion records of the pioneer Harbaugh and Younkin clans. Among the other major features are tributes to more than 100 cousins who have lost their lives in wartime military service; coal and steelmaking accidents; and railroad and trolley accidents. Its online Quilt Museum and Museum of Creativity celebrate the artistic output of cousins all across the nation, and its Western Pioneers section tells the stories of wave after wave of cousins who migrated westward in the 1800s and early 1900s, never to return.
As hundreds of cousins have provided their own input, the site has added stories of the clan’s direct local connections to H.C. Frick's coke ovens, Fallingwater, Braddock’s Grave, National Road, Pitt basketball and early “anti-smoke” legislation in Pittsburgh City Council. Nationally, the family’s is directly linked to the Battle of Little Big Horn, construction of the Panama Canal, Oklahoma Land Rush, Project Mercury space flights, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and the Big Band age.
Perhaps the site’s most groundbreaking research captures the racial discrimination faced by one branch in Philippi and Grafton, WV – offspring of a Pennsylvania German father and Native American mother – who for generations afterward were labeled derogatorily as “colored” and “guineas” and cast out of white society. Also labeled as part of the “Chestnut Ridge Community,” their descendants intermarried more than 40 times with the Mayle-Male family.
Site creator Miner updates the site several times as week as new research findings are made, and is backlogged answering voluminous email inquiries. Professionally, he wears two hats as CEO of Mark Miner Communications, LLC, a public relations and marketing firm serving the professions; and as chief marketing officer for Malin Bergquist, a Pittsburgh top 15 public accounting firm. He has been named to the Renaissance Hall of Fame of the Public Relations Society of America for his work in the fields of law, accounting and civil engineering.
Read the original Minerd.com announcement from May 2000.
Copyright © 2010 Mark A. Miner