You may have noticed some exciting changes on our homepage lately. Since the addition of user photo uploads to ePodunk, we’ve decided to feature some of the most interesting shots from various shutterbugs across the US. In case you missed them, here are the photos that have already been featured on ePodunk:

“View at Mather Point” Grand Canyon, AZ.
Submitted by ePodunk user podunker on 12/28/06.

“Swingin’ Medallions concert on the square” Wrightsville, GA.
Submitted by ePodunk user hometown on 12/28/06.

“Downtown Columbia, waterfront” Columbia, NC
Submitted by ePodunk user ilemme on 12/6/06.

“Gilgo Beach in September” Babylon, NY
Submitted by ePodunk user lcad on 11/20/06

“Hiking the Chilkoot Trail” Dyea, AK
Submitted by ePodunk user kristenk on 11/30/06

“On the bluffs” Mendocino, CA
Submitted by ePodunk user jhdecker on 11/19/06

So, get out your camera and venture out into your community to see if your photo makes our home page!

After your photo is submitted, it will be reviewed and posted online. If your photo wins a coveted place on our homepage, you’ll receive an email to your My ePodunk email address. Don’t be a sore loser! Even if your photo isn’t chosen for the homepage it will appear on the page of the community you photographed.

More information about how to submit photos here.

The Christmas spirit infiltrated ePodunk this week. The famed 1946 Frank Capra holiday classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, was highlighted by ePodunk users when the community of Bedford Falls made it into ePodunk’s list of top searches. Bedford Falls, listed in ePodunk’s collection of imaginary places and patterned after the real town of Seneca Falls, was this week’s sixth most searched for place in our listings of over 46,000 community profiles.

Unlike the wholesome Christmas cheer that made its mark on the ePodunk US top listings, a different kind of celebration made the small town of Penistone, England the community on ePodunk UK that topped the charts. Our top searches are listed on the right-hand columns of our US and UK homepages.

Happy Holidays from ePodunk!

Last week, I attended the 25^th anniversary gala event for the Writers & Books organization in Rochester, NY. The keynote speaker was John Berendt, a Syracuse, NY native and best-selling author, who was awarded the “Sense of Place” award for his representations of Savannah, GA in his novel “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and Venice, Italy in “The City of Falling Angels.”

After visiting Savannah in 1982 and Venice in 1996, Berendt explained his fascination with each place and the way his experience there was shaped by having an outside perspective.

Berendt discussed the ways that people reflect the place they’re from, whether it’s in their expressions, grammar, the detail in their stories, or their humor. In Venice, Berendt explained that he was shown that Venetian reality is always slightly tinged with fantasy.

Like many authors before him, the locations Berendt writes about are paramount in his novels. Berendt quoted Wendell Barry, who said, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are” and Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The best American writing is regional.”

ePodunk also shows the connection between literature and place on our community pages. Take a look at our literary quotes page that shows how some places have been interpreted and described by literary greats.

Yesterday, ePodunk was notified that we have been chosen as one of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s iGuide sites.

An Encyclopaedia Britannica representative wrote to us yesterday:

“Another thing we do is that for most of our topics, we identify and screen other Web sites to supplement our own content. These Web sites, called iGuide sites, are then presented as recommended resources for our online readers. Our reason for doing this is that we realize that other sites, like yours, also offer high quality content and we want to share that with our members.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica chose ePodunk because of our page for Merioneth County in Wales. Our UK site has grown a lot in the past few months. Check it out here!

It’s been a big week at ePodunk. We’ve launched three great new features, that we’re really excited to tell you about.

PHOTOS: Now you can send us your photos of your favorite places to be uploaded on ePodunk pages. We’re looking for photos that emphasize place, so we can give you an even better representation of the cities and towns we profile. I uploaded the above image of Peaks Island, ME.

To upload photo of your own, just go to any community profile, browse your photos for an image you want to send us, select it, and then click the “send” button. Label the picture with a description and the date it was taken, and you’re all set. You’ll create your own ePodunk log-in name, (a free, and very easy process) so you can check back and see the photos you’ve uploaded and see when your photos have been added to our site.

HISTORIC MAPS: If you’re looking for a different view of US cities and towns, check out the historic maps and drawings we’ve added to our community pages, like the above map of Peaks Island, ME. You can now browse more historic maps and drawings by state. Check out more Maine maps here.

AUDIO: Have you ever been confused about the correct pronunciation of a city or town? Wonder no more, because now you can hear local voices pronouncing place names across the country. While browsing our community pages, you’ll see the icon below next to the place name:
Click the icon to hear how the community’s name is pronounced.

If there is no audio icon, instead you’ll see:That means we need a pronunciation for that community! Do you live in a city or town that has a hard name to pronounce? Have a great local accent? Check and see if we need your hometown’s pronunciation. You can supply that to us, and have your voice published on the web! Call our toll-free number, 1-800-701-1266. You’ll get our voicemail, where we request you tell us the name of the community you’re submitting, and the county and state where its located. Then, repeat the community’s name, clearly, so that we can record and put your voice on the web.

More about audio.

It’s an exciting time at ePodunk, and we’re asking you to more involved with the content we provide on our site. So send us your pictures and give us a call! We’re excited to hear from you.

You may have noticed the “Well-known residents have included” section on many of our pages. A seemingly simple category, it matches celebs with their hometowns and other places of residence. But what happens when a celebrity is linked not to her hometown, but to her hometown’s rival community? We were alerted to this outrage by email yesterday.

B. wrote:

“I was born and raised in Westerly. I now live in Stonington. I could be wrong, but I do not think Ruth Buzzi ever lived in Westerly. If so, not for long. She was born in Stonington, CT and attended Stonington High School. This much I know for sure….Hopefully this will be of further assistance to you. I am pretty certain that people who have lived in Westerly and Stonington all their lives will react that same way as I did when I saw her listed with Westerly. She’s a Stonington girl for sure.”

Wanting to set the record straight on the comedian made famous from her appearances on the 1960s TV hit, “Laugh-In,” I did some extensive Googling. I soon discovered that Westerly, RI, and Stonington, CT, are bordering towns on the Rhode Island-Connecticut state line. B. described the rivalry: “If you are from one you are from one, if you catch my drift.”

Still, I was only able to find online evidence connecting Buzzi to Westerly; some sources noted that she had claimed her hometown was Wequetequock, CT, without any mention of Stonington.

The only way to clear it up, as B. pointed out in a later email exchange, was to call her family’s business, Buzzi Memorials, in Stonington. As it turns out, the facts are more complicated than I had imagined. Both B. and I made calls to Buzzi Memorials and heard the same family history from a Buzzi family member.

B. reported back:

“I’ve got some good information for you. Harold Buzzi, Ruth’s older brother, called me back. He runs Buzzi Memorials on Route 1 in Stonington. He told me that Ruth was born in 1936 at Dr. Anderson’s ‘hospital’ in Watch Hill, a village in Westerly. Watch Hill was and is a vacation hot spot in New England - great beaches. I put the word hospital in quotes because it wasn’t a modern hospital like we think of today. Westerly Hospital was the first modern hospital in the area.

“The Buzzi family was living on Dayton Street in Westerly at the time of her birth. They moved to Stonington in April of 1942 and Ruth, Harold and their other brother Edward grew up there. Ruth did indeed go to Stonington High School, graduating about 1953 or 1954. She would have been 5 or 6 when she and her family moved to Stonington, so she really grew up there, not in Westerly.

“Again, I am certain that if you polled people in Westerly and Stonington and asked them if they associated Buzzi with Westerly or Stonington, they would say Stonington.”

I also verified these facts by calling Buzzi Memorials. To sum it up, Ruth Buzzi was born in the Westerly, RI, hospital and lived in Westerly until she was about six, when her family moved to Stonington in 1942. However, because there was no post office in Stonington, the Buzzi family retained a mailing address in nearby Westerly. As for Wequetequock, CT? I was told Wequetequock is a village located in the Stonington area.

As ePodunk listings go, technically, Buzzi was a resident of BOTH places. You can see her listing as a well-known resident on both ePodunk pages: Westerly, RI and Stonington, CT.

Have we missed a well-known resident in your town? Submit it to us by sending an email to info@epodunk.com

-Emily

ePodunk is excited to announce the launch of our Ireland site! Now, it’s possible to browse our 447 community pages, view county profiles, search for birth, death, and land records, and send postcards featuring Irish communities.

Look for cross-links between our US and Ireland sites. Due to the high volume of Irish immigrants to the US, it isn’t surprising that many US communities were named for Irish places. So when you come upon Dublin, NH, you’ll see our link to its namesake, Dublin, Ireland.

We are continuously adding more information to our Ireland community pages, as well as adding new places and websites to our listings. I’ve mentioned only a few of the exciting features of ePodunk Ireland, so add http://ei.epodunk.com/ to your bookmarks, and check it out!

Images of Ireland, Past and Present:
Above, postcard of O’Connell’s statue on Sackville Street, Dublin. This image, from the early 1920s, shows Nelson’s Pillar in the background. The monument was blown up by the IRA in 1996 and was later replaced with the Spire of Dublin. Sackville was renamed O’Connell Street in 1924.

Above, ePodunk researchers in October, 2006 at O’Connell’s statue with the Spire of Dublin in the distance.

For more Information about our research trip to Ireland, see our October blog entries.

-Emily

Twenty-four communities in the US go by Freedom, according to our records. That’s one more than the number of Eagles. Neither, however, compares to the number of this country’s Liberties. There are 116 of those.

As of last Friday, searches no longer have to be limited to a particular state, though that’s still possible. On our home page, the search function now includes an option to include “All.” When this is chosen, the search will not discriminate by state. All matches in the country will be given.

There are numerous practical benefits to this ability. If you have incomplete genealogical records and are unsure about the state within which a particular cemetery or community is located, a state-less search for that place might be more helpful. For us at ePodunk, it just seems like fun.

I’ve always thought a lot of towns in the US were named after foreign capital cities. On almost every road trip that I’ve taken, I’ve run into a small town that has boldly named itself Rome or Berlin or some other fancy European city. Such starry-eyed hopes for so many places.

Everybody knows about Paris, Texas. But have you ever heard of Paris, Kentucky or Paris, Idaho? Or, for that matter, the other 18 places in the US that have taken the name of France’s capital city?

More frequently, though, our cities and towns take their names from more familiar places, like the nation’s founders. So it should come as no surprise that Washington is not just this nation’s capital city. With 188 communities of that name, it also appears to be the most common American community name. At least, that’s what we came up with this afternoon.

Gunnar

After getting the following email this morning, we thought we should explain what was going on with ePodunk last night. One user writes:

“Have your site bookmarked on my real estate site as a tool… and a fabulous one. However when you click on the pages, we’re getting nothing but a white blank screen. Having problems? Can you fix it quick? I hate being without my epodunk stats.”

Last night we had a programming glitch that caused our pages to appear blank for about a half hour. We did our best to fix the problem as soon as possible and now everything is working well again. So, keep ePodunk bookmarked, and always email us at info@epodunk.com so that we stay on top of problems, comments, and questions.

We’re back in the office today, having taken from Ireland pages of research, books, maps, as well as fantastic cultural experiences.

Not so fantastic were our last row seats on our Continental Airline flight home… with a close proximity to the bathroom. Whew!

Keep an eye out for the launch of our new Ireland site soon!