Who would have ever dreamt 25 years ago I would still be cranking out stories and research about our Casto ancestors! You may not be amazed but I certainly am!!!
In 1997, Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term, gas was $1.22 in the US and 2 pounds, 70 pence in the UK, the Dow was less than 8000, Princess Diana died in a car crash in France, and I had a 4-year-old and 6-year-old at home. I was corresponding with so many people about Casto research that I decided to start a newsletter. I’m sure part of my thinking was several of the genealogy groups I belonged to at the time had newsletters and I had just discovered about a former Casto newsletter called Casto Chronicles. On July 1, 1997, I published the first of an eventual 25 issues devoted to researching the Casto family and putting distant cousins in touch with one another. There were 4 issues a year from 1997 to 2003. Before Issue #2 was ever printed, I had created the Casto Connections website and started putting items too large for the newsletter on the internet which was still a relatively new thing. As a matter of fact, my website is older than Google, Monster, Wikipedia, or Priceline.com. In the early days, Casto Connections was even ranked one of the top genealogy sites in the world!
The newsletter had about 200 readers in 3 countries, all from word of mouth, one Casto to another. Sometime around 2011, I started the Casto Connections group on Facebook and now have about 800 Casto members, most from the US but also from Italy, Canada, UK, Belgium, Ireland, Argentina, Australia, and Switzerland! What started as my goal of sharing and helping others has spread to so many of us helping each other! I couldn’t have asked for anything more!
Until Next Time,
Danita
About the Alternate Site
This alternate site is built (for now) in WordPress. The original idea was to help people using smartphones. However, because WordPress is built to respond to the size of the screen you use, you can also try out this set of pages with a desktop computer, too! However, to try to make pages load faster, graphics have been omitted.
Warning: This part of the site is still under construction! The parts of the site that have been converted to the “new” WordPress format represent a small portion of the whole of Casto Connections. We’re working on this gradually, so some parts of this site (the “new” site, or castoconnections.com/wp) link to pages on the “old” site (castoconnections.com). Where that happens, the “old” site page will open in a new tab on your browser. If you’re using a phone, pages from the “old” site may look very tiny.