The Development of Don's Websites

My Family Tree work began in the late 80's when my son Stu asked for help with his grade-school assignment:
    "Draw a chart on an 8½x11 sheet of paper showing yourself, your parents & their parents"

Just a simple view: 7 pencil boxes in a matrix with no details other than their names—my online Family Tree has since grown extremely large!!

Soon after this event, I purchased my 1^st Family Tree development tool ( details are below ) & began building… once I learned how to best use the tool & how to upload the data to my Ancestry account ( you'll have to log in to view ) the 1^st action for the tree data was to add myself & my parents ( below ), followed by my birth event ( use the link above and scroll down? ) that included my DOB & the place, and ( later ) many, many notes, thoughts, etc

I then added my immediate family ( view with clickable entries ); it shows my ancestral colours! View a current & more detailed equivalent chart…

    My two sons, Stu (who today lives with his wife, Jill as of this writing) & Alex, who was aged ~6 back then ( sadly R.I.P. today ) with their mother, Brenda

    My Mum & my Dad with their births, their marriage & some of the events for them that I know of…
          ( both are R.I.P. today, each from many years ago )

    Their parents ( my grandparents, all of whom are R.I.P. ) and my great-grandparents are each shown in this pedigree chart ( with clickable elements ),
        as well as their brothers/sisters & their children, e.g. my uncles/aunts/nephews/nieces & my cousins…
            
My personal family life today is with my beloved wife Sandy whom I had met and married in the early 90's… more on this family is shared below!

Many ancestral branches have been added in my family tree over the last 40+ years, some of which are extremely long (!) and go way-way-way- back into the distant past… more details follow below!

As a 2^nd thread for this review of my website development work, many of the pages started to appear in early 1985 with the establishment of my Creative Logic Software, LLC business; see an older view here? I also used the Norton PC Tools PC app to help manage my files, etc

The connectivity of my online website storage & my uploads was via a BBS, ExecPC.com, today absorbed into another business
     (click to view the screen snapshot—a WiKi page also has more info)

I created a paid CLS account with them for hosting services, storage, etc, and the 2,400 bps modem that uploaded my files was not secured in any way, just a simple tool that ( luckily! ) was never hacked… The modem speed grew to 14.4k bps through the '90s; today's high-speed online link (via our Xfinity paid account) provides extensive coverage, where I use BlueHost (where I have an account) to do my work like editing this page, etc (!) and the FileZilla app to manage large blocks of files

Today's prevention of the endless online hacker-access/virus/etc attacks on my PC is via BitDefender, one of the best paid tools available!
I initially started all of this in the late '90s with a follow-on of my then well-loved Norton anti-virus tool, evolving to Kaspersky Internet Security in early 2013 & then to McAfee, which I replaced when it turned to some bad stuff… see my Computation page for more info?

The many pages above fall into 3 main areas:
    a) My current Home Page holds many BlueHost ( above ) page elements, each of which were established via the embedded WordPress development method;
        I also built my 1^st Home Page here with >1,860 files in 40+ structures

    b) My dynamic family tree ( with more details below ) holds many files ( >70k / ~5.1gb ) in a dozen uploaded structures

    c) My older tree holds >24k files in 5 main structures w/many additional pages… my profile, my story & many others

View my "Visual Map" (top-right in many website pages) to see the list of my key web pages; a 1980's eDiary page also shares a similar but different view…

Returning to my Family Tree, researching the extensive historical data from many, many sources since the late 80’s ( the last 4+decades ) has allowed me to automate thousands of matrices like this one, showing Jessie my 2^nd maternal GGM and her family and, with each and every connected person in my tree, which ( over time ) has had many, many tweaks, deletions & adjustments etc! I also created a "Help" page to share how you should best access the features provided ;)

Progress with my tree data has brought me large collections of data with more than 18.5 thousand people ( as of this update ), who together share >6,520 families and live ( or have lived ) in >7,760 places around the world. There are >55,300 associated events, with dates for births, deaths, marriages, etc, some stretching back into ancient history from today's 3^rd millennium, where you can "eTravel back in time" for more than 5,700 years—visit this page for more info? These events also each include one ( or more ) references to my >2,260 sources, totaling >8,000 citations, all with thousands upon thousands of supporting pictures, thoughts, stories etc…

Several very interesting individuals who are directly connected to me have appeared during my 40+ years of researching…
    1^st, aside from my immediate family ( shared below ), I have discovered many links to Kings, Queens & others as I worked back into the ancient northern
      European branches; view a report of the Vikings that begins with Dag DagsSon, my 50^th paternal GGF, and view Eystein ThrondsSon who ~1,300 years ago
      gained the Norwegian title, "King of Uppland & Hedmark, Earl of Trondheim," which he held until his death in 759AD

    Next, chasing further back in time using Biblical history, a connection appeared ( via another persons' research ) to a very ancient
        person—my 80^th paternal GGF, Enosh ben Seth who was born 5,793 years ago…
      Shown as a grandchild of Biblical Adam & Eve, he would have been an actual ( presumed! ) descendant of Yahweh, who today
        is an entity of several Christianic belief systems

    3^rd, a number of additional ancient actual ( vs. Biblical ) people & places are also in my tree around this time, dating back
        to 3,769 years before the start of our calendar ( which, as of this writing, was 2,025 years ago )…
      See a snapshot of the person who remains the furthest-back generation in my tree, & view the list of ancient people in
        my dynamic descendants tree data page?

    4^th was the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Elizabeth Windsor II, who ascended to that role 2 years before my
        birth & sadly died in September of 2022, aged 96… she is still my 17^th cousin, once removed

    5^th is perhaps the most remarkable discovery in my Family Tree research, a direct ancestral link to my paternal 27th Great-Grandfather, William I,
           born October, 1024 in Beauclerc, northern France
        He was the Duke of Normandy, later becoming the 1st Norman King of England by using his sword & his large army in the Battle of Hastings…
        The battle was fought on Senlac Hill, just seven miles NW of Hastings, Sussex in England on a Saturday, October 14th, in 1066… it is
           captured by the Bayeux Tapestry (view?) commissioned in the 11^th century to commemorate the victory
        King Harold II of England ( the last Anglo-Saxon King ) who was killed by Williams' Norman forces at the end of the bloody, all-day battle,
          shot in the eye with an arrow, according to legend; his forces were also destroyed

    Finally, here's an overview of my family… note: links to each are shown above
      My parents & grandparents

      My 2 brothers & their families, one living in England, the other in Australia, with a total of 6 nephews & nieces

      My 2 sons, Stu ( & his wife Jill ) and Alex who sadly is R.I.P. as well as their mother

      My wife & our 4 grandkids, 2 boys & 2 girls (whom as of this writing are aged between 8 & 14) who started to appear in 2011
          via our 2 daughters (who married their hubbies in the fall of 2011 & in the summer of 2014) who each came from my beloved wife… such a blessing!!

Returning to my tree data, I started to establish this in the late 1980's ( as shown above )…

The 1^st computer tool I used was from the Parsons Family Origins business, with which I built my 1^st SQL database for the tree. As that tool expired in the mid-90's, my usage evolved thru the McKiev tool (which was discontinued in 2016 for various reasons ) to my active use of the RootsMagic tool, where I manage the many people, places & events as described above—currently running with a >47.5mB SQL file. The data came from researching people, families & places across many, many generations; their events each contain dates, stories & pictures as well as my extensive thoughts & threads…

Certain geographical locations in my Family Tree are abbreviated to reduce space; see the list of US states and the area of "British Colonial America" which is generally abbr. to BCA

Early in 2021, I had decided to establish a way to allow everyone to see all of my Family Tree data vs. just my Ancestry account… the website that I've created seems to work really well—am in the process of considering a formal publishing of my work for posterity!!

The "Objective Evidence" behind each person's events is shared by me, using an exported Roots Magic GEDcom file that I load into a tool that "grinds up" the data to make my Family Tree using the settings that I established… sadly, some "auto-generated stories" are poorly formatted & a little off-base!! I also wrote some VB code ( over many, many hours!! ) to crunch the data for analysis, improvements & updates to the tree

The method for this creation was ( and still is ) really quite straightforward:
   > A GEDcom file is exported from my RM tool, currently at 65.2mB with 1.8+ million lines of text
   > The created file is then loaded into the GEDsite tool that splits it into >59k segments (~5.2gb) which I then tweak a little & upload as my tree
   > I also tweak the GEDcom file using my VB code ( see details below? ) to split it into segments (68.4k) subsequentially reassembling
         it into a new GEDcom file for re-importation to the RM tool, looping back to the start of the method as needed

GEDsite does a detailed analysis of the GEDcom file, building a website from the data, structuring people, places. images, etc. Prior to the upload, I added some pages to the basics ( a Home page, Help & so forth ) and tweak my personal page (and others) to improve the view; click "Standard" to view the untweaked page?

I created the Visual Basic-based GEDcom-split-out driver on my PC during 2020 with a formally structured code set, that, (using the GEDcom file as the source) dynamically makes appropriate adjustments, corrections & tweaks to the events in each person's data, such as ensuring that anyone's death event ( where needed!! ) contained a note describing why/how the person died, the date ( which may have been estimated ) and a place, etc, as well as ensuring that every person had a source record. In the past I used the VBA editor to analyze, correct & formalize place names, particularly in & around the UK, where the date(s) shared had occurred in various past times such as in PreRoman England, the Britannia Iron Age era, or during Medieval England from 1066-1485 here, etc…

Some final stats around the development of my websites…
    The initial public release of my Family Tree was in March of 2021, and was updated every few months until July, 2025, likely the last round…

    Each person in my Family Tree has a unique ID, starting at #1 (myself) & incrementing to a large number; see details of everyone here?

    For the people who were born >110 years ago with an unknown death fact, I added one (with a date-based guess if not known)

    Many of the people that I actively added did not have a known birth date ( see an example ), so I added one as a guesstimate…

    As my generations each reach far back into the past beyond the 1^st millennium, the "older" data there is unavoidably less firm!

    Certain names & places hold international characters; an example is Caroline Zuege's who's name may show as "Z?ge"

As a final advisory for this page,
    (1) My data is All Rights Reserved © April/1988 – date Don Shave

    (2) My Copyrighted (©) web pages do not hold any Fake data, nor are they using any AI enhancements

    (3) As legal issues can surround such things as my published advice & opinions,
          my Privacy Policy & Disclaimers page is a mandatory addition… please review?

Also, should you choose to use, review or copy any data contained within any of my websites, 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!

ps: the older static-data page that I used to source this page is here as an FYI…

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