September 2005

A poster of the Ground Zero Quilt is now available.

February 2003

There was a lot of activity centered around the Ground Zero Quilt and the web site in the month of February.  The quilt was between engagements at the beginning of the month and we decided to try to identify every picture on the quilt. 

We have received a number of private guestbook entries asking if a relative or friend was pictured on the quilt. The pictures on the quilt are supposed to represent all of the victims, but in reality the total number of pictures on the quilt is only a small portion of those that were lost. And Lois did not keep track of exactly who was on the quilt or where.

We do not usually have the quilt with us, so when requests come in, we have to look at digital pictures of the quilt to see if we can find the person requested.  Lois did keep almost all of the pictures that she printed. 

 As mentioned on the "About the Quilt" page, over 1,000 pictures were downloaded, and around 800 were printed. The quilt had over 700 pictures, in diamond shapes, stitched together into the Lone Star pattern. When the border was added, around 100 of the pictures ended up as small pieces around the outer edge, unidentifiable as pictures. 

Lois numbered a grid so every diamond that was not one of the ones cut off along the edge was assigned a letter and a number. 

We laid out the quilt out and went through the pictures comparing them to the pictures in the diamonds on the quilt. As we identified a picture in a diamond, we covered that diamond with a large white circle sticker. 

We started on February 1st and searched for pictures whenever we had free time.  Some friends also came over and helped. We completed the project on February 9th.

We identified 616 of the pictures on the quilt, and there were another 6 pictures that we could not find the match for. So now we know who and where each picture is.

We do not intend to publish this information, we want the quilt to represent everyone who died. But, if we get a private guestbook request, we will be able to let you know if they were one of the identified pictures on the quilt.


That was not all that happened in February.

While we were concentrating on identifying the pictures on the quilt we didn't notice that the number of people visiting the web site had increased dramatically. The majority of our web site visits come from people e-mailing our link to their friends. We do not know how many people visited the web site at the beginning of February, but in 10 days the web site had more people visit than in all of January, when we had close to 40,000.

We were only supposed to use 10 Gigabytes of bandwidth a month, but our web hosting provider allowed us to use more than that in November, and again in January.  He contacted us on February 8th and told us we had already used 21 Gigabytes of bandwidth, and that he would not be able to let us use more than 30 Gigabytes total for the month.  We reduced the size of some of the pictures, and moved some of the pictures to a friend's web site, but still we reached the 30 Gigabyte limit on the morning of the 11th. If you tried to view the Ground Zero Quilt web pages between the 11th and the 20th, you only saw a message that said we had exceeded our bandwidth.

Right away we started researching other web hosting possibilities. We did not find a new web host and get the web pages back up until Thursday, February 20th.  In the process we added a new domain name (www.GZQuilt.com) and rearranged some of the web pages.  We also had to delete the first 2,000 comments from the Guestbook. We kept a copy of the 2,000 comments, they just didn't get reloaded. Now that we are on the new web host, we should have enough bandwidth available.

While our web pages were down we were contacted by Robert Dean who heard about our problem from a friend. He offered to let us use his web hosting service temporarily so that we could make the web site available again. While we did not take him up on his offer, it was very encouraging to us to receive it.

We should probably thank our old web host AlwaysWebHosting.com for the great service they provided while we were with them.  We would have stayed with them if our web site had not become so popular and  demanded so much bandwidth.

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