There are several questions to be asked and problems to be solved when compiling family histories. Here are a few:
- Who are the histories intended for?
- How will I present them?
- How will I distribute them?
- How will I deal with photographs?
- How will I quote sources?
- How will I update them as I gather new facts?
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After mulling these over for a while I decided that a good solution would be to write the histories as a series of hyperlinked family group sheet/histories which could be viewed by any modern web browser software. This would have the following advantages:
- The collection (or subsets thereof) could be distributed on diskettes or CDs
- Individual family group sheet/histories could be updated as required
- The collection could be viewed on, or printed from, any computer equipped with web browser software
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This project is now under way and currently comprises over 60 individual family history pages, many of them with photographs and subsidiary pages based on wills, newspaper reports and other similar material. Each history consists of a main section detailing the members of the family, with supporting material gleaned from birth, marriage and death certificates, parish register entires, census returns, etc. There is always a Sources section. Occasionally there is an Anecdotes section containing unauthenticated material found in informal documents such as letters or word of mouth communications. Many of these are good stories but must be taken with a large pinch of salt. Nevertheless, those I have investigated have always contained at least an element of truth.
In order to illustrate this approach to a wider audience I have deposited edited versions of 15 of the histories from my maternal line on this web site. They are a selected subset of my own research and have been compiled from a variety of sources.
The full set histories for the family 'IntraNet' will eventually be supplemented with :
- Five generation trees linking to the individual histories (e.g. my own ancestor tree)
- Outline descendant trees
- GEDCOM files of ancestors
- GEDCOM files of various ancestor's descendants
- Folders containing collections of photographs
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