Speaker Profile: Joy Fisher

Joy Fisher is an Engineer by training and has been using computers for nearly 50 years. She became interested in genealogy four decades ago. Searching for ways to use the computer to assist in doing genealogical research, she became a sysop [administrator of a computer bulletin board] for a genealogy bulletin board back in the early 1980's. She began translating and transcribing Russian church records in the early 1990's. These records were uploaded to an experimental server and made available via FTP (before the age of browsers).

Joy was on the Kentucky (KY) mailing list when Jeff Murphy announced his small Muhlenberg County website and USGenWeb was born. She started websites for two KY counties soon after and has been part of USGenWeb ever since. She is the founder of SDGENWEB, the South Dakota state pages for USGenWeb, and maintains several county websites in Nevada, Florida, Illinois, South and North Dakota, as well as Los Angeles County in California.

Since its inception in 1996, Joy has been a part of the USGenWeb Archives. The Archives has steadily grown from a few text documents to more than 2 million text files and over 5 million photographs and document images. She can be reached at jfisher@sdgenweb.com.

Joy Fisher will be presenting an Introduction to the USGenWeb Project. Learn about these all-volunteer managed, free websites accessible by county and state and the vast resources they have for the family history researcher.

posted by Denise H. Richmond