Test-Driving a Theory

 

When family history research gets messy—or worse, uncooperative—it sometimes feels like all we can do is grasp at straws. I prefer to label those straws, "theories." Once I can articulate clearly what that theory might be, unless the going gets far rougher than all the alternatives, I'm quite willing to take that theory out for a spin. I like to see where the possibilities can take me. If the road leads to a dead end, then it's simply a matter of turning around and retracing those steps back to the starting point. Simple.

So now, further and further away I wander from my original research goal: to determine whether two Kelly men in Fort Wayne who jointly purchased a family burial plot were actually related. The reason for my quest is to gain any direction on not only where in County Kerry John Kelly originated, but who his parents might have been. My reasoning is that John Kelly and the co-purchaser, Timothy Kelly, must have been close relatives to have made a joint financial arrangement like that, so far from their native Ireland.

What led me yet another step away from my research goal was the discovery, in Timothy Kelly's own obituary, that he had a sister. John Kelly's obituary, dated ten years earlier, mentioned absolutely nothing about any siblings—indeed, nothing at all about any of his immediate family, so it gives me no road map for saying yea or nay about any sibling relationships. In the hopes that uncovering more detail about Timothy's sister might lead me to the answers I was seeking regarding John, let's follow the trail to see where it might lead us.

Based on other reports I had found, there was a woman by the name of Margaret Kelly living in Toledo at about the time of Timothy Kelly's death. As suspected, she was a single woman—although the possibility that she had married someone sharing that same surname couldn't be ruled out—but according to the 1900 census, she was considerably younger than Timothy, with a date of birth occurring in 1841.

I've found census records to be rather soft on accuracy of ages, however, so let's look for any other details we can find on this Margaret Kelly of Toledo. We need to consider whether we have located the right Margaret Kelly.

From that same census enumeration, we can see that this Margaret was born in Ireland—don't you wish they had said something more?—and that she reported arriving in the United States in 1859. By the time of this census, she had managed to own her little home at 324 Saint Mary's Street free and clear of any mortgage.

What was interesting about this Margaret Kelly was that, despite being single, she was not living alone. In her household, she reported having two younger women, both of whom had the same surname, and both of whom Margaret called her niece. The younger of the two, twenty four year old Katherine Sullivan, had arrived in the U.S. as a young teenager, making it seem possible that she might have traveled with her parents or another relative.

However, if Margaret Kelly's other niece, Margaret Sullivan, was Katherine's older sister, the fact that she had only emigrated two years prior to the census casts some doubt upon that theory.

At any rate, in this family circle of three  women, we now have a possible way to push back the cover from some of the hidden details of this extended Kelly family's past. We can follow the trail in Toledo from that snapshot in time in the 1900 census forward to the next date when any of them show in any records.

Furthermore, if the two Sullivan women were indeed Margaret Kelly's nieces—and not just young people extending the moniker of "aunt" to a family friend—that would mean it was their mother with whom they shared the Kelly connection, thus leading us to yet another sibling for Timothy Kelly.

If...if...if... There are a lot of caveats in this conjecture. However, with the ease of locating records now, we may as well take this theory for a spin and see where it leads us.

Traveling to Toledo

Researching our roots is a step-by-step process in which we trace our ancestors' every move, only in a backwards direction—from current residence back to forsaken homeland, from last days to early years. When the family's personal history follows a logical trajectory, the search may be simple. What happens, however, when family history research takes a turn, directing us to look in a different city?

While the focus of my search right now is a man who settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we've now found evidence that Timothy Kelly had connections to another midwestern city: Toledo, Ohio. To find our Kelly connection in Toledo would be a challenge primarily because of the commonness of that surname. That's when we have to reassess all the clues we've already assembled and see if they can point us in the right direction in this new research journey.

For one thing, Timothy Kelly's own obituary mentioned the name of his one remaining sister: Margaret. That she was still single, after all those years, was suggested by the fact that her surname still was Kelly. A few mentions in social sections of the Fort Wayne newspapers, where our Timothy had lived for most of his adult life, suggested that this Margaret Kelly lived in Toledo, Ohio.

There were, as I discovered, a few other connections between the Kelly home in Fort Wayne and the Ohio city of Toledo. Considering some of the Kelly family were railroad men, that is not surprising. There was, for instance, a curious report in the June 8, 1898, Fort Wayne Sentinel, headlined "Brakeman Shot." The article began,

Mrs. Richard Kelley, of 73 Hoagland Avenue, was summoned to Toledo yesterday by a telegram which stated that her husband, a brakeman on the Wabash road, had been injured.

Richard, as I had already discovered by tracing Timothy Kelly's family through each decade's census entry, was one of Timothy's sons. The unexpected report—the result of a fight at a boarding house for railroad employees—at least gives me an idea of the whereabouts of that particular son of Timothy Kelly. As a side note, the injury was not fatal, and it did indeed involve the correct Kelly, despite the newspaper's typical misspelling of his surname. Furthermore, the address for the Kelly household was confirmed only a couple years later with the family's entry in the 1900 census. (Ironically, the injured Richard Kelly went on to serve as one of Fort Wayne's police captains, many years later.)

Another Toledo connection regarding the Kelly family was noted through the census record, twenty years later, when Timothy Kelly's youngest daughter Deborah—by then known as Mrs. Frank C. Pence—resided with her husband in Toledo.

By 1920, Timothy's sister Margaret was long gone, but she certainly wasn't hard to find in the census records before her passing. There was, for instance, an unmarried Margaret Kelly, who had been born in Ireland in March of 1841, on Saint Mary's Street in Toledo, according to the 1900 census. Conveniently, this Margaret Kelly's household included two nieces from Ireland, who were likely sisters: Margaret and Katherine Sullivan.

It wouldn't be too terribly difficult to see if those three names could be pieced together to find the family nexus. More exciting, though, was the possibility of tracing these three women to see if anything further could be discovered about Margaret's and Timothy's mutual place of origin—and, possibly, the name of their parents, as well.

Discovering that last detail would provide the next step in determining just how Timothy Kelly might have been related to that other Kelly man I'm primarily interested in: John Kelly, the husband of Johanna Falvey, who, with his wife, had immigrated from County Kerry to Fort Wayne back in 1869.

The Neighbors on Brandriff Street

It may seem like some family history research leads us in never-ending circles. In the case of my husband's second great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey, and her husband John Kelly, it seems that no matter what lead I follow, it doesn't bring me straight to any answers. And yet, each step spirals around to connect with a point I'd already reviewed.

In trying to break through this particular family brick wall and move back another generation, I had hoped that following the Falvey side of this couple would yield more success than pursuing a name like John Kelly. We already know that would be a hopeless pursuit in Ireland—even if we narrowed down the search to "only" County Kerry. So I had focused on the Falvey side, in hopes it would be a somewhat less common surname to research.

And yet, here we are, coming full circle back to the street on which a possible relative to Johanna Falvey happened to live exactly next door to a possible relative of John Kelly. That came from pursuing a possible relative of Johanna's possible relative Daniel Falvey in a town not sixty miles from the town where a possible relative of John Kelly's possible relative Timothy Kelly lived.

Got that?

So now, we need to take a step back and review what we know about Timothy Kelly, the man who, along with John Kelly, had purchased a family burial plot at the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

It's been years since I last worked on the family tree of this Timothy Kelly—almost four years, to be exact. To look at the census record for 1880, about ten years after John and Johanna had arrived in Fort Wayne, it is easy to see that both sets of Kellys had settled in the same neighborhood. John and Johanna lived in a little house around the corner from both Timothy's family and that of Daniel Falvey on Brandriff Street, close to the rail yards where so many in this extended family gained their livelihood.

Rather than review the particulars on the family of John and Johanna, I'll just refer back to my introductory post from 2016 (here), if you are interested in brushing up on the details. Likewise for the information on the family of the other Kellys (here).

It was in researching the newspaper entries for Timothy Kelly that I learned of his connection to at least one relative who lived in another location in the United States. The one thing that seemed curious to me, in researching Irish immigrants in America, is that so many appeared to be the only one from their family to have moved away from their homeland in Ireland.

For those whose records don't reveal any details about their parents' identity, often the key to further discoveries is tracing their siblings—and yet, in these Irish cases, there sometimes was no sibling to be found in any mention of the family. Thus, my frustration in coming up empty-handed after chasing after clues about Daniel Falvey's parents in "Upper Sandusky."

In Timothy Kelly's case, though, there was a mention of a sibling. It was on the very last line of his own obituary in the Fort Wayne Sentinel on September 21, 1901. Simply put, the obituary mentioned, "Margaret Kelly is a sister of the deceased."

It was from a multitude of other searches that I learned anything more about Margaret Kelly. As you might suspect from a surname like Kelly, I couldn't just assume any person by that name—even in Fort Wayne—was the right Margaret Kelly, Timothy's sister. I needed to follow other news stories about this Kelly family to learn just where Margaret Kelly actually lived.

Thanks to some of those chatty one-liners in the social reports included in newspapers of that era, I discovered that some members of Timothy Kelly's family had traveled to Toledo, Ohio, to see about their ailing aunt Margaret. Sure enough—no surprise here, considering that common surname—there was a Margaret Kelly in Toledo. We'll take a look at what we can find about her, tomorrow.

Maps and Minor Details

When researching a family line in a new territory, it may seem like we are talking about the same place—say, when we mention a place name like "Sandusky" instead of the more "full" name of "Upper Sandusky." But in my quest to locate information on the origins of one Daniel Falvey of Fort Wayne, Indiana, when his 1915 obituary reported his immigrant family had first settled in Upper Sandusky, I figured that would be one and the same as Sandusky—or at least nearby.

We've all made that sort of assumption. Especially when researching a new area, it's easy to think that, say, West Des Moines would be, uh, west of the city of Des Moines.

So Upper Sandusky should be north of Sandusky, right? Not really—not, especially, when we are talking about a river (yes, the Sandusky is a river) which flows northward, quite the opposite of what we'd normally expect of rivers with a north-south orientation. When the folks at the Fort Wayne Sentinel heard that Daniel Falvy's parents settled first in Sandusky, perhaps they automatically assumed that meant the city of Upper Sandusky.

But when I couldn't find any Falvey or Falvy family listed in the 1860 census other than one lone family in Ohio, I was desperate enough to take a closer look at what I had found. The census enumeration for that Falvey family listed a post office by the name of Sandusky—not Upper Sandusky, mind you—but it also gave the location for that household as being in a place called Kelleys Island.

What is Kelleys Island? Turns out, as Miss Merry noted yesterday, it's a small island—a little over four square miles in size—located in Lake Erie. Interestingly enough, before the island was acquired by the United States, the British originally called it Sandusky Island. But that would not have been the case by the time when that Falvey family was found on the island—only in the 1700s.

By the 1830s, two brothers by the name of Kelley had begun purchasing land on the island, eventually developing docks to export lime from the island's kiln works as well as other products. The island drew laborers from various immigrant groups, including the Irish. The enterprising Kelley brothers eventually owned the entire island and changed its name to Kelleys Island in 1840.

As you likely suspected, there is a place called Sandusky nearby, but it is on the mainland of the Ohio coast. Since it would be unlikely that, by the date of Daniel Falvy's passing in 1915, any newspaper editor would still persist in calling the island Sandusky Island, perhaps it was the city of Sandusky—rather than Upper Sandusky—that was meant to be mentioned in the Falvy obituary.

From my vantage point as a family history researcher—especially one casting about for possible clues—it is near impossible to determine whether Michael and Mary Falvey on Kelleys Island would be the relatives with whom Daniel crossed the Atlantic as a boy. Of course, scouring passenger lists of ships arriving at all eastern seaboard ports may be another step in this research process, or possibly tracing Michael and Mary through future census records to see if there is any other nexus between them and Fort Wayne.

However, being introduced to the possibility of Kelleys Island opened my eyes to another idea. With the island situated in the midst of Lake Erie, not far from the international border, I began wondering whether Daniel and his relatives might have approached their midwestern destination from a different direction. Looking at a map, it was not lost on me how easy it might have been to cross from Ontario to Ohio, possibly even hopping islands on the way to the port of Sandusky.

Indeed, that very route has been suggested, in reverse, in a book from that same era, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, where those escaping enslavement with the goal of reaching Canada headed to Sandusky, where they would board boats crossing Lake Erie. If that was the route for the Underground Railroad, it is likely that the reverse was a possibility, as well—reminding me to check Canadian records to see whether I can find any trace of Daniel Falvey and his parents.

The frustrating thing about researching some seemingly unattached Irish immigrants is to remember that many did come over as individuals. While Daniel's obituary portrayed him as a very young immigrant and thus implies he traveled in the company of others, there was no sign from records in Fort Wayne that he had any siblings or other relatives with whom he maintained any continuing connection. Despite the chatty nature of the Fort Wayne newspapers' social columns, I could find no jolly mentions of out of town visitors for the Falvy family, nor even any editorial clues that Daniel had any connection with Johanna Falvey or her connection by marriage with the Fort Wayne Kelly family.

In staring at maps of the vicinity of Sandusky and Kelleys Island, though, I did notice one other thing: the proximity to another city. Not only was Toledo barely sixty miles to the west, it was the site of another shirttail relative's puzzle I've yet to figure out. Perhaps it's time to revisit the story of Daniel Falvy's next door neighbor, Timothy Kelly, and his relatives residing in nearby Toledo.

Above: Birdseye view of Sandusky, Ohio, circa 1898, produced by the Gugler Lithographic Company for the Alvord & Peters Company of Sandusky, Ohio; image courtesy the U.S. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

What Happened to the "Upper"?

Years ago—uh, make that decades ago—when I worked in radio broadcasting, there was an ad campaign created for the holiday shopping season on behalf of a company called National Semiconductor. As you can imagine for a business name of that length—particularly when it was a fairly new name among holiday shoppers—someone had to be very clever in creating a catchy tag line that would stick.

The ad company came up with a story line in which a hapless account exec had purchased billboard advertising for the new brand. As you can guess, the billboard was not large enough to accommodate the entire sales message plus business name, which left off as "Give someone you love a National Semic." This led to the scathing comment from the boss, asking, "What happened to the -onductor?"

In searching for that possible relative of my husband's second great-grandmother, Johanna Falvey, I've been chasing her Fort Wayne neighbor, fellow Irish immigrant Daniel Falvey, back to his supposed landing place. According to his obituary, he had settled first with his parents in a place called Upper Sandusky.

It is not hard to see why a move from Upper Sandusky would be so logical for a man who, for the rest of his life, lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Though Upper Sandusky is a city in the neighboring state of Ohio, it is nearly a straight shot due west to Fort Wayne—a trip of only one hundred miles. A reasonable guess might be that Fort Wayne, which eventually seemed to be a railroad magnet, might be connected to Upper Sandusky by rail. Sure enough, in trawling through railroad history reports, I did locate one line—the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad—which did exactly that.

Sold on the theory that Daniel and his family might well have been located in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, as early as the 1860 census, I took a quick look to see what I could find.

Surprise. No Daniel Falvey.

Not even Daniel Falvy.

Since I had just crafted a quick search, throwing in the location as simply "Sandusky," I went back again and dropped the first name. Fine. I'll just look for any Falvey family at that location.

Little did I know that Ohio apparently contained not only an Upper Sandusky, but also a "Post Office" called, simply, "Sandusky." Here's what I found: an 1860 household of two forty-year-old Irish immigrants named Michael and Mary Falvey, along with a two year old child, also named Mary Falvey. Along with the Falveys, in their household was another family, composed of thirty year old Michael McLaughlin and two children of that same surname, Mary and Daniel.

Whether Michael and Mary Falvey were related to our Daniel Falvey, I can't tell yet. That, however, wasn't my main concern, once I took a long look at that faded digitized copy of the 1860 census. Though the census page stated the local post office was called Sandusky, the actual location of this particular Falvey residence was not exactly in the city of Upper Sandusky, as Daniel's obituary asserted so many years later. It was in a place called Kelleys Island.

Where's Kelleys Island? And whatever happened to the "Upper" for this Sandusky?

Above: Image from the heading of the 1860 census for the Sandusky Post Office entry of a Falvey household; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Do You Have a Secret Archive?

When biographer Gerald Martin was attempting to collect details to assemble the life story of Nobel laureate novelist Gabriel García Márquez, his reticent subject explained, "Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life."

While many have seen truth in that statement, they might not claim any application in their own life. No matter which way you view the oft-repeated statement, for the family historian, I'd like to borrow that statement with one revision, and apply it thus: to the repositories in which your family's stories are hidden.

When we drill down through the prevalent documents we use to flesh out our family's stories, we are accustomed to accessing some public records, but I'd like to introduce the thought that there are not one, but three types of archives without which we won't fully be able to reconstruct the lives of our ancestors. Those three types are public archives, private archives, and secret archives.

We are quite familiar with public archives—the repositories where we go to receive copies of court records, for instance, or view national documents like census enumerations. While many of those documents are specific to individuals—such as death certificates or records of military service—a great many of them encompass collective information of a geographic vicinity, as well. Often, the data contained on these records are highly organized into specific categories based on the purpose of gathering and preserving them for future reference.

While not as many researchers access the second type of repositories—private archives—these are also a great source of information, if your ancestor is included in such a collection and if you are granted access by the private institution. There are finding aids to help answer questions concerning the former case, and lists of required credentials published for those who wish to access such records. Sometimes, the requirements for access are quite stringent. While you may not be aware of such private archives, they are definitely out there; I know, simply because our city has one such repository not far from where I live.

It's the third type of archives I wish to focus on today, though—the one which may be the hardest to find, and yet might be the one yielding the most coveted information to add to a family's story: the secret archives.

If you doubt there is such a repository, you need go no farther than the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) at the United States Library of Congress, where in the "about" page you can find this offer to facilities (emphasis added):

If a repository is interested in publicizing its hidden collections but does not feel that it has the resources at the present time....

Admitting this little detail outright may be an eye opener to some people, but when we assess all the possible places where we can go to gain a fuller picture of history—whether of a nation or of a family or individual—there are several resources out there which simply cannot be found without a persistent, diligent search.

Yet, we can drill down even farther in our quest to uncover hidden repositories. I'd like to suggest that in that unorganized conglomerate of hidden collections, we include a second type of secret archive: that of the stashes of heritage which families have secreted in attics, trunks, bottoms of desk drawers, and guest room closets filled with the family stuff. Those of us who have become, as Denise Levenick calls it, "keepers of the family stuff," are well aware of the treasures which may lie in such an uncharted stash. The only problem is that we don't really know what, exactly, is in that stash—just that we have it, safely tucked away until we get around to sorting through it.

Worse, those secret archives of family memorabilia may not even be in your attic—nor even the trunks or drawers of your parents or that maiden aunt. The keeper of the stuff about your family may turn out to be the third cousin you never met—maybe never even heard of. Only in learning to have a mindset of reaching out and collaborating with others researching the same surnames will you even have the chance to stumble across that third cousin. Witness the story shared last week by Miss Merry, where it was someone else in her town who turned out to have the only two pictures of her great-grandmother she had ever seen.

If we don't connect with our fellow researchers, we won't learn who else has the family treasures we'd so dearly love to see—nor will we, in turn, become the resource for someone else who'd love to see what we have in our secret archives.

It may seem, when we first receive it, that our secret archives is an avalanche of unlabeled trash. That may well be the reason people put off organizing it—we wait to "get a round tuit" simply because we have no idea what some of those papers actually represent. Afraid of making a mistake and tossing the valuable or, worse, rescuing only the trash, we defer and procrastinate.

Even if it turns out that a photo or record in that stash doesn't belong to our own family line, we can make someone else's day by connecting an interested researcher with the treasures of their own family. I did that once, years ago, when sorting through some very old photographs of a long-gone distant uncle, sending home a portrait of a young man who turned out to be just a family friend. To us, such items represent strangers. To that stranger's direct descendants, though, the hidden parts of our secret archives can become transformed into the gift of a family treasure.

To do that, though, requires the persistence to sort through and identify what we have in our own stash, our secret archives. Then, we need to discover how to connect with other researchers in that family line. It may seem daunting in the aggregate, but piece by piece, we can do our part to reconnect people with their family's heritage, a most rewarding outcome.

Off the Shelf: Killing Marketing

It's been a long time since I last talked about the books I am reading. I can explain: life's been happening. And.

Not all the books I read are specific to genealogy, of course. It only seems like I eat, drink, sleep, and breathe genealogy. In reality, I do other stuff, too. With a caveat, of course. Remember those old get-into-college word analogy tests from high school years, the kind that has you wrestle with a sentence like "this is to that as the other is to..." and then you pick a fourth item to fill in the blank?

Ever since high school, my brain has learned to work like that. So, the caveat is that even the books I do read will invariably trigger some genealogy-related thought. If not specific to pure genealogy, you can be sure it will be related to at least some aspect of coordinating a genealogical society. Those are the not-so-rose-colored glasses I'm seeing through right now.

So, while my mind was trying to concentrate on marketing while reading this book, Killing Marketing, by authors Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, I couldn't help but notice how well their advice would apply to those of us wishing to support group efforts in the pursuit of our family history.

For instance, Pulizzi and Rose compare traditional advertising to the child in the back seat during a family road trip, asking, "Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?" The goal of old-style sales departments was to get the word "out there" in every channel they could, in the hopes that the right set of eyeballs would light upon the right ad at just the right, buyable moment. Which meant that ads saturated the environment. One never knew when would be just the right moment to catch the potential customer. Thus, the continual harangue.

It doesn't take long, in thumbing through this book, to realize that the authors are advocates of a more content-driven approach to marketing. Perhaps we can call this a more holistic approach, at least from the point of view of what the customer needs, not what the company would like to sell. The book is full of mini case studies of companies with approaches which seem more respectful of the customer's needs.

In telling of an online resource acquired by Johnson & Johnson—BabyCenter.com, where mothers can share insights, observations, or questions—the authors quoted a Johnson & Johnson executive who revealed the value of the website to the company. Basically, the data gained from the thousands of consumers who participated in the online site provided the company with insight on what their potential customers preferred, needed, or would love to have, if it were a new type of product or service to make their life easier. The authors' conclusion from this example?

If we can begin to gather more valuable data from our audience, we can become a more competent company—and enable much better business decisions across the sales and marketing spectrum.

In another example—one far removed from the type of daily business most of us would conduct—the authors mentioned a company in business to provide various chemicals for electronics companies, a very specific niche market, to be sure. One strategy employed by the company was to set up a blog on engineering topics which would be useful for their core constituency. Having given a tech-sounding example of the type of content shared in this blog, the authors commented,

Even if you don't know what that means, you can appreciate what they are striving for: to bring ideas to life through interactive conversations.

That's when the connectivity light bulb went off in my head: bringing "ideas to life through interactive conversations." Remember those old genealogy forums where some of us used to post our queries about our brick wall ancestors, or where we hoped to find distant cousins to collaborate with us in pushing back further through the generations? At one point in the early years of online genealogy, that multitude of conversations produced an impressive mass of data.

Think of that resource for a moment, not from the viewpoint of a family historian, but from the point of view of the company who missed their opportunity to trawl through all that information to assess trends and where their customers would be headed in the future.

Now, of course, the company more likely to benefit from all that genealogy researchers' data is Facebook, not Ancestry.com. Perhaps Ancestry already knows what all their customers would like to buy from them next, and doesn't bemoan such a loss of information. Or perhaps they will wryly nod and agree with the authors' observation:

An audience that you are delivering value to today may not be in the market for your product or service. But the audience members will be more than happy to tell you when they are in the market for your product or service, and you will be top of mind when they are.

Not that this only has to do with genealogy niche giants such as Ancestry. Those of us running far smaller organizations like Your County Genealogy Society Dot Com can take such advice to heart, as well. I don't know about your local society, but when our board brainstorms on how to attract additional potential members, invariably there is someone who pops up with a suggestion which has more of the "are we there yet, are we there yet" flavor than our twenty-first century opportunities merit.

Even as small "companies," our organizations need to take on a future-minded approach to outreach. We need to envision the "typical" member of our future and speak to those people's needs. One bit of advice shared by the authors of this content-marketing book will serve us well, even as nonprofit organizations—and especially as we craft our social media outreach plans or upgrade our website design to draw in potential new members.

One of the critical things to understand about the investment in an audience is that it is made of up people who want to hear from [us]—continually.... These are people who are willingly sharing their personal data, interacting with our tools and giving us permission to converse with them because we are delivering value through the content-driven experience.

You are "delivering value," aren't you? It's that value you provide which will encourage others to increasingly interact with you until they realize they may as well become a part of your organization, not just as visitor, but as member. In exchange, the information you glean from these future members will reveal just what your potential "customers" would like to receive from your organization—a mutually beneficial feedback resource to help you remain pertinent to others well into your future.