by Dick Ciampia
Greyhound-Data is a great resource for everyone and I wanted to point out a couple of things that I’m sure some of you know and some of you don’t.
When you go to a dogs pedigree on G-D if you scroll down on the left-hand side you will see View XX Gen sire line. the XX for the more recent dogs will be a number in the 30’s. If you look to the right a little you will see, almost always, Pilot. that is the dog almost all pedigrees trace back to and if you click on the direct sire line link you will see all the name in the direct sire line. The direct sire line is the top line of sires as you look at your dogs pedigree.
I would guess 95% of the dogs trace back to Pilot and the only other dog that would show as the first sire is Wilby. If you see another dog besides Pilot or Wilby post it here, but I really doubt that you will.
There are also a few people we all owe a great debt of gratitude to for making the pedigrees as complete as they are.
Around 2009 Chris Molnar came up with a program that entered all the charts for the races. The tracks had to send him the charts for each days races and then he could enter them into G-D without people entering them by hand which is how all the older races were and still are entered. When you see the charts for a dog that is from 2009 to the present those should be all his/her races.
I think it wasn’t until 2011 that all the tracks were sending their information to Chris.
Next would be Martin Roper. Martin was an original G-D team member and was entering pedigrees and races from the beginning. G-D put a counter in after a number of years so you can see how many dogs and races a person entered. While Martin’s counter shows almost 7,000 dogs and 10,000 races entered he probably has thousands more from before the counter was installed. Plus, on one of the forum updates it wiped out some of the numbers. Not sure why.
Martin concentrated on entering a lot of stake races since those are the dogs that shaped the industry. If you look at a dog like Real Huntsman it shows 20 something races, though he had more, and martin was probably the person that found the charts and entered them.
Then we have Ilse Rasmussen. She is now 91 years old and still enters pedigrees almost every day. As you look at a dogs pedigree and look back a few generations there is a good chance Ilse entered those dogs. Her dogs entered counter shows 339,234, but Like Martin she was an original member of G-D and her dogs entered is probably 400,000. Worldwide there are 2.3 million pedigrees enter into G-D and we don’t know how many are U.S. pedigrees and how many are from other countries. So whether you use Ilse’s 339,000 number of her 400,000 number she has entered a big percentage of the U.S. pedigrees.
I talk to Ilse 3 or 4 times a week and being born in 1930 and being born in Germany she grew up under Hitler. She is fascinating to talk to and she is still sharp as a tack. Her stories about growing up during the war are vivid as she describes things.
None of these people ever look for recognition so I thought it was important that people know who helped get the U.S. part of G-D to the point it’s at.
We didn’t do a good job preserving our history and these are some of the people that are doing what they can to go back in time and preserve what they can.