The Development of Don’s Websites

My family tree work began in the late 80’s when our son, Stu asked me & his Mom 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 tree matrix with no details other than their names—my online family tree has since grown extremely large!

Soon after that, I purchased my 1^st family tree tool (see details below) for my PC & 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, followed by my birth event (view details), that included my DOB & the place and (later) many notes, thoughts, etc, etc

I then added my immediate family—view my family (with clickable entries) showing my ancestral colours or a current & more detailed equivalent chart…
    My two sons, Stu (who lives with his wife, Jill as of this writing) & Alex, who was aged ~6 back then (sadly R.I.P. today) with their mother

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

    Their parents (my 4 grandparents, R.I.P.) who were all born in the 1900’s as are my 8 great-grandparents who are in my pedigree chart
        as well as their brothers/sisters & their children, e.g. my uncles/aunts/nephews/nieces & my cousins…
            
I have grown many ancestral branches in my family tree over the last 30+ years, some of which are extremely long (!) and go way-way-way back into the distant past… more details follow!

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

The connectivity of my online website storage & uploads at that time was via a BBS, ExecPC.com, 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 had initially started this in the late ’90s with a follow-on of my well-loved Norton anti-virus tool, evolving to Kaspersky Internet Security in early 2013 & then to McAfee, which was 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 this “Visual Map” (top-right in many website pages) to see a list of my key web pages; a 1980’s eDiary page shares a similar but different view…

Returning to my family tree, researching historical data over the last 3+ decades allowed the creation of an online matrix (showing my 2^nd GGM) of 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 from the late 80’s brought my tree to a large collection of people with (as of this update) more than 18,100 of them, who together share >6,370 families and live (or have lived) in >7,500 places around the world. There are >54,300 events with dates for the births, deaths, marriages, etc, some stretching 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? The events also include one (or more) references to my >2,190 sources, totaling >7,970 citations, all with thousands upon thousands of supporting pictures, thoughts, etc…

Several very interesting & directly connected individuals have also appeared during my 30+ years of researching…
    1^st, aside from my immediate family (below), I discovered many links to Kings, Queens & others as I worked back into the ancient northern European
      branches; view my Viking ancestry report that starts with my 50^th paternal GGF, Dag DagsSon, & Eystein ThrondsSon (see an older view?) who 1,300 years ago
      gained the Norwegian title, “King of Uppland & Hedmark, Earl of Trondheim” which he held until his death in 759

    Next, chasing further back in time using Biblical history, a connection (via another persons’ research) to a very ancient person
        appeared—my 80^th paternal GGF, Enosh ben Seth (see an older view?), 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 ~2,024 years ago…
      See a snapshot of the person who today is the furthest back generation in my tree, & view the list of ancient people in
        my dynamic descendants tree data page?

    4^th is 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 (see a WiKi view?)… she is my 17^th cousin, once removed

    5^th, my 27th Parental GGF is William Beauclerc an ancestor (scroll down to the area showing him?) of the Queen of England.
      He was the Duke of Normandy in France, later becoming the 1^st Norman King of England by use of his sword & his large
      army in the Battle of Hastings in 1066!

    Finally, here’s an overview of my direct family… they 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. & their mother

      Our 4 grandkids, 2 boys & 2 girls (who, as of this writing are aged between 6 & 13) started showing up in 2011
          via our 2 daughters (who married their hubbies in the fall of 2011 & the summer of 2014) who came from
              my beloved wife, whom I had met and married in the early 90’s… such a blessing!!

I started establishing the family tree data on my computer in the late 1980’s…

The 1^st 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 use evolved thru the McKiev tool (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 52.2mB SQL file. The data in my tree all came from researching people, families & places across many, many generations; their events contain dates, stories & pictures as well as my extensive thoughts & threads…

The “Objective Evidence” behind the person’s events (which I control using RM) is created via an exported GEDcom file, loaded into the GEDsite tool & “ground up” to make my current dynamic tree, using the settings that I established (the method is below)… sadly, some “auto-generated stories” are poorly formatted & a little off-base!! I also wrote some code (over many, many hours!!) to crunch the GEDcom data for analysis, improvements & updates to the tree

Certain geographical locations in the tree are abbreviated to reduce space; see USA states & “British Colonial America” which is generally abbr. to BCA

In late 2019 I decided to allow everyone to see my family tree data vs. just my Ancestry account… the website that I’ve created does seem to work really well—am in the process of formally publishing my work for posterity!!

The method for this creation was (and still is) really quite straightforward:
   > A GEDcom file is exported from my RM tool, currently at ~61.5mB with 1.6+ million lines of text
   > The created file loads into the GEDsite tool that splits it into >70k segments (~5.1gb) which I then tweak & upload as my tree
   > I may also tweak the file using my VB code (244k, details below) to split it into segments (31.7k) subsequentially reassembling
      it into a new GEDcom file for re-importation to the RM tool, looping back

The GEDsite tool does a detailed analysis of the GEDcom file, building a website from the data, structuring people, places. images, etc. Prior to the upload, I add 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 a Visual Basic app 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 app to analyze, correct & formalize place names, particularly in & around the UK where the date(s) had occurred in various past times such as in PreRoman England, the Britannia era, or during Medieval England from 1066-1485 here, etc

Some final stats around my website developments…
    The initial public release of my tree was in March of 2021, and it continues to be updated every few months

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

    For people born 110 years ago (or more) with an unknown death fact, I added one (with a date guess if not known)

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

    As my generations each reach far 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, Legal Issues do surround such things as my published advice & opinions, and my Privacy Policy page (also shared below) has therefore become 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 static-data page that sourced this page is here as an FYI…

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