R I P Ion Ernest Castro

20th Nov 1948 - 30th August 2018

Ver:July-29-2019
Press Obit

We are sorry to bring you the news that the proprietor of 1066.net,
and many related sites, Ion Castro, 
succumbed to a brain tumor in August 2018 diagnosed a few short months before.

Ion, a former councillor for Baird Ward in Hastings, curated 1066.net from its inception in 1997: 20+ years, an eternity in Internet time, until a few months before his passing,
Ion lived nearly all his life within Hastings and St Leonards, which he loved dearly. He was born in the Old Town and was a true philanthopist who greatly loved the town he was born in, and was very proud of it.
In the 20+ years of 1066.net's existence, he produced well over five thousand web pages of often detailed histories and information about our community's past and present, and opinion and action pieces about its future. Also,innumerable photographs of many local events, often as panoramas. He had been toying warily with the idea of converting the site to WordPress a massive undertaking, and even of getting a quadcopter to film the town for the site. Sadly, these ideas never materialised and we all ran out of his time with us on earth.
He provided many local charities and societies free of charge their very first domain names and emails and access to their own presence on the Internet from very early on. He achieved the massive 1066.net project with old school FTP pages that his family have decided should remain largely unchanged for the forseable future as a legacy to his dedication and wide range of local interests. Google is well aware of the site, and a new Search box has been added at the end here and on the Home page.
Most pages will remain unchanged for some time now and you are welcome to create DIRECT links to articles and images within.
Please do not copy things to your own site without permission, while this cannot be prevented, it would really be appreciated if you did not do so, as a tribute to his work. If corrections are required, please let us know.
We may be willing to provide sub-domain DNS or 303 Page Redirection for local organisations on a case by case basis- for example: something.1066.net, so please ask.
Thank you for the incredible turn out for the celebration of Ion's life and also at the wake afterwards in September 2018 in the Old Town, which was a lovely opportunity to renew connections and swap stories. Ion is greatly missed and was always a character larger than life.
-- Paul Castro, younger Brother, Site I.T; [email protected] Below is a Search you can use within some of the larger sites Ion provided