Development of My Ancestral Data

My work on the ancestral data that has formed my family tree began over 35 years ago; my son had asked me to help him with his grade-school homework assignment:
    "Draw a chart on an 8½x11 sheet of paper showing you, your parents & their parents"

Just a simple matrix of 7 pencil-drawn boxes on paper that has grown to many, many people!

Soon after that, I purchased a computer tool (details are below) to begin building my family tree… once I understood how to use the tool & how to upload the results to my Ancestry account (you’ll have to log in to view), I started to add data to the tree for myself, adding my birth, the place of my birth & the date, then some of the early events in my life, etc (uploading as I went)…

I then added my immediate family: Stu aged ~8, Alex ~6 (today sadly R.I.P.) & their mother) & then my Mum & Dad (with their births, marriage, etc that I knew), their parents (my grandparents), and their brothers and sisters with children (e.g. my uncles/aunts & nephews/nieces) & so forth… I happily learned so **many** new things about my extended family as I worked & researched! These people are all viewable here… there’s a built-in “Help” page that shares how you can use the data!

Progress from that early point in my research has brought my family tree to a very large collection of historical data, with (as of this writing) more than 17,900 people (who make more than 6,000 families) who each live (or have lived) in >7,300 places around the world; these people each have births, deaths, marriages, residences, etc, etc (with >53,000 events) using one of today’s >2,100 sources that total >7,800 citations and thousands upon thousands of supporting pictures, etc…

Several interesting people have appeared during my research; click the link to open a new page & then scroll down to the area showing William Beauclerc, my 27th Paternal GGF… he was the Duke of Normandy in France, later becoming the 1st Norman King of England by use of his sword & his large army in the Battle of Hastings in 1066!

The 1st computer tool that I used with this work was The Parsons Family Origins, evolving thru the McKiev tool to others; today I use RootsMagic

The data that forms my family tree comes from researching the people and families across many, many generations; the events for these people (stats are below) contain places, dates, stories & pictures as well as my extensive thoughts & threads… all are shared with my dynamic tree data pages. The "Objective Evidence" behind the events are shared in each of the auto-generated stories, created by the GEDsite tool (sadly, some of these stories are poorly formatted & a little off-base…) from a GEDcom of my family tree data which I control using RM. I also built some code (over many, many hours) to crunch an exported GEDcom file for analysis, improvements & updates to the tree!

For each person in my tree, event-based facts (in many locations around the world, see link above) stretch back into history from today's 3rd millennium, "traveling back in time" for more than 5,700 years… visit this page for more info?

A handful of ancient biblical people & places are also in my tree, dating back to 3,789 years before the start of our calendar, currently (as of this writing) 2,023 years ago… visit the static snapshot of my "Most Ancient of Ancient People" & the person who is the furthest generation back in time? Also, view them & other biblical people in the dynamic descendants data page?

In the tree, certain geographical locations are abbreviated to reduce space: see the USA states as well as "British Colonial America" which is generally abbr. to BCA

People in my tree that were born 110 years ago or more each have a death fact that I added (as an estimated guess) if not known; some of the people that were created did not have a known birth date, so I also added one (as an estimate)… Also, as my generations reach far, far into the past beyond the 1st millennium, the "older" data there is unavoidably less firm!

Each person in the tree data has a unique ID, starting at generation 1 (myself), incrementing to a large number; certain names & places also unavoidably hold international characters, accents, etc; as an example, Caroline Zuege's alternate name may show as "Z?ge"… the list of their places is above

The static-data page that sourced this page is here…

Should you choose to use or review any of the data that is in my family tree, please be aware that some parts are of necessity "less formal" than those which are "officially registered" & keep this under consideration before sharing any issues?

    Cheers!

No end-of-page info? Scripting is disabled in MIE/Win11…details here