Rules for Adopting a Minnesota County  

If you would like to adopt a county follow these easy steps:

1) Check the County Selection List to see if  your county is available. If it is not available, consider volunteering to assist the person who coordinates the county.

2) Read everything on this page, and the USGenWeb Rules page.

3) If after all this, you agree to everything, then email me and we will get you signed up.

4) For help in setting up your pages you may contact:
Tim   Wilkin County coordinator

Rules for Minnesota Counties

Note: These rules are subject to change at any time without prior notice.

This is your page, have fun, give it your own flavor, but please keep a few things in mind. Make sure you include these 5 elements for Minnesota and all of the USGenWeb required elements.

1) Adopting a county means it is a part of The USGenWeb Project. It is sad to say, but some people adopt counties merely to promote their family genealogy. There is nothing wrong with including your family genealogy on your pages, but please keep it to a dull roar so that folks know this is a USGenWeb page and not a family page. The name of your page should be something like ?? County, Minnesota, USGenWeb (or MNGenWeb), and not My Genealogy Page. 

2) All county pages are required to have an official USGenWeb Project Logo and links to the USGenWeb Project and a link to The MNGenWeb Project prominently displayed near the top of your pages. At this time, the MNGenWeb logo is not required but you may want to add it to the website. The official name is The USGenWeb Project, our state project name is The MNGenWeb Project.  NOT GenWeb.

A) The Required links are:

      The USGenWeb Project  http://www.usgenweb.org

      The MNGenWeb Project   http://www.mngenweb.net

3) All County Coordinators are required to be subscribed to the MNGEN-L mailing list. This is where we discuss all matters having to do with the project and it gives me, as the state coordinator, a method to communicate to all Minnesota coordinators in one mailing. There will also be "Roll Call" on this list every so often you will need to respond to.
4) If you volunteer to coordinate a county we will require that you have it online in a reasonable amount of time. No, we do not expect you to have it up in a day or a week. However, when it is a number of weeks later and the pages are still not up, it is not fair to researchers anxiously waiting to visit your pages, or to other who might be waiting in line behind you to adopt the county. We realize that things may come up that delay your pages such as waiting for an account to be setup or your ISP going down, but rest assured that we will work with you to resolve these matters. 
5) The USGenWeb Project and The MNGenWeb Project will not support any form of copyright violation by you or your volunteers. For protection from possible lawsuits by publishers or authors, there are a few steps that you should follow.

A) If the reference material is not in the public domain, you should first check the Authors Who have Submitted Permission page to see if the author has already granted permission, and the Authors who have refused permission page. If they are not on either list you should obtain written permission from the author or publisher of that material and be sure it is on file with USGenWeb. You may obtain a copy of the permission to do lookups form, and instruction on how to file that permission HERE.

B) You should also include the USGenWeb copyright disclaimer on your lookup page and be sure that your lookup volunteers read this disclaimer. Suggested versions of wording you may use can be found here.  The complete USGenWeb copyright FAQ may be view at http://usgenweb.org/volunteers/copyright.html

Now you need to make sure you include each element required by USGenWeb:

USGenWeb Rules

There are a few basic requirements that every county page must meet in order to be associated with our project and be included on the Master County Index Page for a state. These requirements may be found here.

FAQ of questions I get asked most

•Residence in a county is NOT required! Most county hosts do not live in the counties that they coordinate. They adopt the county because they love it or because they do most of their own research in that county they have a knowledge of it and want to help others.

•Knowledge of making web pages is not a requirement. There are many online sources to teach you, and a number of our other county hosts would be willing to help you also.

•"Any" USGenWeb volunteer is welcome to a free FTP account at RootsWeb, where you may upload your web pages. Volunteers may use as much space as they need for genealogical data, though RootsWeb does request that users not upload personal GEDCOM files, or use the space for any financial ventures. Most volunteers house their pages here, and there is a mailing list named Rootsweb-help where you can get all the help you might need plus some.
Uploading Your Website Pages:
Website Help -- Website Design and Maintenance Links
If you need assistance with getting your page up.

Updated - 14 May 2019

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