Preston has just finished creating the advanced search page, a feature people have been asking for for just about as long as the Charley Project has been around. Check it out!
Meanwhile, I have finished cases with last names starting with the letters A-G, I, O, and U-Z.
This week’s featured missing person is Kianna Galvin. (I had to ask Preston how to change the MP of the week.) Kianna is a 16-year-old girl who disappeared from South Elgin, Illinois on May 6, 2016. She has some distinctive tattoos; I have a photo of one.
The police don’t think she ran away, though some sites list her as a runaway. Given her age, one inevitably wonders about human trafficking.
Awhile back, Megan Elizabeth Garner‘s mom contacted me on Facebook. As I had practically nothing on Megan’s disappearance, I was happy to hear from her.
Sadly, Megan’s mom didn’t have much to tell me. She said the police have dutifully followed leads in Megan’s disappearance for the past couple of decades, but never developed a suspect or a theory of the crime or anything.
Megan’s parents were separated when she disappeared, I guess, and Megan lived with her mom. The family was so poor they didn’t even have a phone when Megan went missing.
It’s a sad story. No telling what might have happened if there had been more publicity in this case at the time.
As for working on the site, I finished W today and I’m working on E. I anticipate finishing E today. So I’ve got cases A-D and U-Z finished, and quite a lot of others besides.
I finished two more letters today. The casefiles with surnames starting with A, B, C, D, I, O, U, V, X, Y and Z and are all done.
Victims of the Green River Killer, Dahmer, and Bundy are all done.
I’ve also entered quite a few first names and did all the cases with those names somewhere in them. I remember doing that with Daniel, Dale, Jack, Joan and quite a few others. Also, the last name Smith is done.
I have relayed your requests to Preston for consideration. I haven’t actually talked to him in a couple of days though.
I dearly wish this — fitting all the casefiles to the new design — was over already and am discouraged that it’s taking so long. I am itching to start updating again.
But I am moving as fast as I can. I worked on this for eleven hours today. I skipped lunch with Michael and his family, ordered pizza, and ate the leftovers at my desk. I ate leftover pizza for dinner.
I am neglecting reading, socializing, everything for this, just so it will get done faster.
Already I am seeing the advantages of this new database. I’ve got a spell check now, for instance, so there should be fewer embarrassing typos on the casefiles! (I also learned I had been spelling “Chrysler” wrong my entire life. I thought it was “Chrystler.” Whoops.)
Anyway. Carry on.
I got a message on Charley’s Facebook page today:
I’m writing you from Karga 7 Pictures in Los Angeles, with serious admiration and awe for the work you do. I’m a producer, researching missing persons for a potential upcoming TV show, and looking for cases that we might highlight for further investigation and inquiry. The irony is, of course, that in order to justify including them in our development at this point, they need to have a certain amount of information already gathered. So often, the kinds of cases I find that have a lot of information and media attention are of middle class White folks, as I’m sure you know. So, to be blunt, I’m looking for cases of missing people of color to highlight, and wondering whether you might be able to point me in the direction of an interesting case with a bit of meat to it? 9,000+ cases is a lot to wade through and unfortunately we never have enough time to be as thorough as we’d like….
So this nice lady would like some suggestions. I have a few in mind, but I’m sure you guys can come up with a few more.
Can you name some black, Asian, Hispanic or Native American MPs who ought to be “hightlight[ed] for further investigation and inquiry”?
Yeah, so all the cases for A, B, O, Q, U, V, X, Y and Z are totally done. I’ve also done probably a few hundred cases in other letters of the alphabet.
All those little girls who disappeared from the San Francisco Bay area where Timothy Bindner was a suspect are all done. The Green River victims are done, as are Bundy’s victims, and Mack Ray Edwards’s victims, the Clinton Avenue Five, etc. Also, anyone with the name “Brandon” or “Brandy/Brandi.”
When cases are connected, I fix them up all at once. And if I search for a name or part of a name and more cases pop up than the one I was specifically looking for, I do them all. Like, there’s a guy with the last name “Brand” and I searched for “Brand” to fix up his case, and in addition to him, up popped up all the people named Brandon or Brandi or Brandy. So I did those too.
I’ve been using lidocaine patches and Advil and somehow my back has not given out yet.
This is all my fault, really. A large part of the reason I didn’t want to upgrade the website before is because I knew how much work would be required to convert every single case to the new format. So I stalled…and the Charley Project got bigger…and now that I finally HAVE upgraded, I’ve got *checks* 9,898 cases to switch over.
Nothing to do but power through.
I’m still chugging away on fixing all the cases, doing virtually nothing else honestly, while trying not to throw my back out.
I know some cases are listed as missing in 2018. I know quite a few more are missing the “details of disappearances.” All I can say is that I am working as hard as I can and will fix all that.
I know the alphabetical indexes are a bit wonky still, and I haven’t even really looked at the other two. I have gotten Preston to fix the O index where all the O’Malleys and O’Learys and O’Whatevers were first, because the computer put O’ before Oa. Preston changed that.
The computer has it, reasonably enough, that the last word in a person’s name (except for Jr. or Sr. or II or III) is listed as the surname. Except there are some cases where the person’s last name actually has more than one word, such as if they’re Dutch (Martin van Harten) or Spanish (Rolando Salas Jusino). Those people are listed wrongly. I’m fixing these as I get to them.
Y’all might have noticed that now, in cases where there’s a date of birth available, the computer automatically calculates what the MP’s current age would be.
It’s kind of eerie for me. Like, I was touching up Breiton Ackerman‘s casefile and noticed: my god, this kid would be 18 now. Graduating high school, off to college or the workforce or the Army or wherever life would have taken him. But instead he’s four forever.
I had been having a problem where whenever I added a new case or updated an old one, all the paragraph breaks in the “details of disappearance” vanished and it became a solid block of text. Obviously this was problematic, particularly in the more detailed cases.
Preston has fixed it. He has also added an “age” thing. And guess who has to go and add everyone’s ages? *raises hand*
I’m plugging away, and trying not to throw my back out (again) in the process.
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