Family Tree Finder

Lost pets find hope

Emmy the dachshund got loose during a family photo shoot. Simba the cat was startled during a bad storm, ran out of the house and didn’t come back. Dylan the bichon frise escaped through the backyard fence. Gary the cat escaped from a porch in the chaos following a house fire.

No matter how it happens, pets get lost every day. Try as she might, Judy Charuhas of Winter Park can’t stop dogs and cats from going missing, but she can do everything in her power to get them found.

In late 2009, Charuhas, along with her neighbor Shelley Heistand, founded WinterParkLostPets.com — a lost and found pet database — to help do just that.

“It takes one open gate to lose a pet, but a community to find it,” Charuhas said.

Emmy, Simba, Dylan and Gary are just four of the more than 200 pets the website has helped reunite since its creation. And with satellite Lost Pets sites in the works around Central Florida, Charuhas said WinterParkLostPets.com is just getting started. WaterfordLakesLostPets.com is scheduled to launch by July 1, and other community partnerships are on the horizon.

How it works

When a pet is lost or found, Charuhas said that an owner or finder can visit the website and upload the animal’s last-known whereabouts, a brief description, a photo and the owner’s contact information — all for free.

This process, Charuhas said, may sound familiar to general open posting websites such as Craigslist. So what does Winter Park Lost Pets have that those don’t? For starters, a human on the other end.

“We’re different from Craigslist in that we verify postings,” she said. “I go through and check each listing and am in contact with all the posters.”

Once a post is live, visitors can automatically generate a lost or found poster to hang the old-fashioned way around their neighborhood with the same information that is posted on the website.

Also, once Charuhas verifies a post, she blasts out an email alert to the websites’ members that a pet has either been found or is missing. Copied on the emails are local vets, rescue groups and shelters, which can now be on the lookout.

This, she says, is the key to WinterParkLostPets.com’s 80 percent success rate for reuniting pets listed on the site.

By alerting different members of the community, she says the website is in effect creating its own community of, as she calls them, “pet patrollers.

Legacy Tree Finder & Family Search | JLog

After a few days of playing around with the new FamilySearch integration in Legacy Family Tree , it suddenly occurred to me that the total number of people I was working my way through was not correct. It said, as it does on the Home screen, 10,827. That’s the total including the disconnected tree.

I don’t mind helping FamilySearch clean up their multiple versions of incorrect information because I get to clean up mine at the same time while writing thousands of emails to hundreds of people around the world and it’s nothing but fun, fun, fun. But I do take umbrage at having to tidy up 1,378 dead people that aren’t mine. So to speak. It’s a lot of laundry and extra ironing.

If you see any relevance to what I’m saying here, here’s what to do:

Go to View/Tree Finder on your Legacy menu and click Refresh to make sure everything’s up to date. Then, highlight the tree you’re interested in working on and click the bottom choice, ‘Tag the Entire Tree of the Highlighted Individual’ with an unused tag number.

Then go over to the FamilySearch screen, assuming you’ve got an account by now.

In the Filter options, pick Tag Value, and the number of your tag and click Update. The first time I did this I got 4 people. Clicking the Reload button fixed it. Now, minus the Living, I’m down to a manageable walk-in-the-park list of only 6,341. Why it says ’0′ for families I don’t know. The chance of them all being single is nil.

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