Site News

This site is dedicated to open discussion about the former linguistic island known as Gottschee (Kocevje), Slovenia. You will also find information about Gottscheer geneaology, villages, food, and folklore.

All contributions have been made by our loyal group of participants since the site's inception in 1995.

Welcome, and enjoy your visit.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where did this site come from?

In 1995 and for many years before that, I was a member of CompuServe, one of the first online services for consumers and a predecessor of the World Wide Web. CompuServe announced that all members would get, as a benefit of membership, one megabyte of disk space for a home page on the then-new World Wide Web. Not finding anything on the Internet under the word "Gottschee" or our family names, I decided the thing that would put my new site on the map real quickly was some references to those words. Thus the site sprang up on ourworld.compuserve.com in December 1995 with a humble beginning of one page, which included a scanned-in photo of my late grandfather Peter Staudacher and his three daughters, Maria Kump, Hedy Pfreundschuh, and Emma Tschern. The picture was provided by my late cousin, Steve Tschern, who was also the first visitor to the site.

I started getting more and more visitors from all over the world who had done word searches on Gottschee or our surnames. In late 1996, the site was moved to a new server that supported CGI (Common Gateway Interface, a way of executing programs through a browser) with Perl scripting (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, a computer programming language). This enabled us to provide the automated visitors page, the Plauderzimmer, and the Gottschee Bulletin Board. The many visitors and the wide range of Gottscheer names on the bulletin board are testament to the fact that many of us have made contacts with old friends and fellow villagers from Gottschee.

In terms of size, as of this writing the site has surpassed 8,000 files and 2.5 gigabytes. I also use this site extensively "behind the scenes" for my work as a systems engineer.

So many places here to post and browse. Where do I go first?

Here's what I recommend:

1. Sign our guest book. It doesn't hurt to make a geneaology inquiry here if you like, but it's intended as a general greeting book and you will make yourself known to the posters who check there regularly.
2. Use the search engine to find pages that may contain a certain word, such as a surname or Gottscheer village. When your results come back, remember that one of them may be one of the long pages like the visitor's page or the Plauderzimmer log. In that case, don't waste your time scanning the page manually for the match word...use your browser's "Find" or "Search in Page" function to go directly to the word you searched for.
3. Bring up the Gottscheer Bulletin Board. Although this forum does not accept new posts, I recommend you look through the posts already there. Once again, use your browser's "Find" or "Search in Page" functions to scan through a long page for a word you might be looking for.
4. If you would like to leave a permanent query or discussion, register and post at the Gottscheer Public Blog. This will be a permanent discussion archive for all things Gottscheer. You may register here to contribute text and photos to the blog; but no registration is required to read the Blog.
5. To join a weekly discussion about Gottscheer geneaology or just to say hello, try the Plauderzimmer (which, by the way, is German for "chat room"). Weekly discussions are Sunday nights, but you can actually post there any time. These messages will eventually scroll off the page, though we do have a log file of previous conversations also available.

I'm confused about what time the Plauderzimmer is scheduled for.

You can post in the Plauderzimmer at any time. However, there is a group that meets there regularly every Sunday night at 9 PM, Eastern Time. For those that may join the discussion from other time zones, the start time corresponds (during the winter months) to 0200 Z (that's 2 AM in Greenwich, England) and 0100 Z in summer.

How much time do you spend maintaining this site?

Surprisingly little. Since the forms and scripts update the pages dynamically, I just pull the pages up once in a while to see who visited or posted. Of course I occasionally make changes that have been suggested or that I think are beneficial, and that may take a little time.

You have a lot of valuable information at this site. What would happen if there was a disaster at your web host?

"Been there, done that!" In late 1997 our host at the time, Nauticom, had a disk crash that wiped out many web sites, including ours. When they finally recovered the site from a backup tape, about one month's worth of updates were gone, including a tribute page to Steve Tschern which was devastating for me to lose...his friends and family had posted there, etc. Well, we wouldn't get fooled again. The site is now on verio.com, a more reliable host with better backup procedures. In addition, about every two weeks or so I compress and download the whole site into one big archive file and keep it on one of our production servers at work. In the event another catastrophe occurred, the site could be recreated on another web host.

I made a mistake in posting to the bulletin board, visitors page, or plauderzimmer. Can you fix my entry?

Most definitely. Email me at hwk@kt3l.com with the details of what you want to delete or change in your post and we'll take care of the rest.

What is the secure site? How can I obtain a login for it?

In response to requests for a way to contribute photos, and for additional chat capability, we have added a "members only" area to the site for those individuals who are regular contributors. All new member accounts are added at the discretion of the administrator and are subject to removal without notice or cause. To apply for your login and password, send me an email stating your interest and your connection with Gottschee.