CuriousFox started life as "The village by village contact site for anybody researching family history, genealogy and local history in the UK and Ireland." (It branched out to have a division for the United States that included cities, but that had disappeared by 2024. The current administrator explained: "When I rewrote Curiousfox into php, a modern computer language, we closed down the links to the US pages as they weren't getting used.")
One of the founders, Rosanne, was one of the major contributors to genealogy categories on the former Zeal website, a volunteer-created search engine.
"CuriousFox was created to allow people to post messages about genealogy and local history without exposing their email address to spammers or compromising their privacy."
There is a page for each village (with messages and links to maps and nearby places), after someone submits info for that village.
Free membership allows one to add entries, search surnames, and send messages to paid members.
Paid membership (far from exorbitant) allows the sending of messages to all members and adds the following features:
- Add a profile
- Submit an URL
- New entry alerts for any village being watched
Familypedia has a similar but totally free structure in place for counties anywhere in the world and can accommodate discussions about any settlements. See Template:Forum creation stub (which seems to need updating), Category:County communities and Category:Forums- local inquiries.