Introduction

Whilst I have been researching my family history for several years now I have only recently decided to publish my findings 'on the web'. I am by no means a professional web master or designer, although I have dabbled a little with the technology over recent years.

I keep all my family history records in a programme called 'Family Historian' and my initial forays into publishing my research were limited to 'uploading' my information onto two commercial sites 'Ancestry.co.uk' and 'Genes Reunited' please see my links page for more information on these sites.

I found this approach extremely helpful in terms of sharing and developing my tree and discovering many previously unknown relatives! However I also found it a little restrictive in that you are bound by the limitations of both of these sites in terms of what can be included. Although I have to say, that Ancestry have recently significantly improved  the kind of information that can now be include on your site.

Nevertheless I still felt the need to express my own individuality by producing a site of my own. I was particularly encouraged in this venture when 'Family Historian' added a web builder to their software a little while ago. This addition made it quite straightforward to build a simple website and if it wasn't for this option, built into Family Historian, I would have been totally overwhelmed at the thought of having to build well over a thousand pages manually - so thank you Family Historian!

So, as you will no doubt have gathered by now my approach has been to use 'Family Historian' to produce the bulk of the pages, with a few minor tweaks to colours and backgrounds, and then to add my own pages, featuring specific families or individuals.

With over 2000 connected individuals in the full file I decided that besides the 'Name index' and 'search' options I would provide a slightly novel way for people to access the information - through our Great, Great, Great Grandparents. Trying to identify all 64 of these ancestors provided a fresh incentive for my research and, hopefully a slightly different and interesting perspective on  the family histories.

Technical Stuff

When I started this project I knew a little about HTML - the computer code 'behind' the page you are reading which should ensure you see the right words in the right places!  All I wanted to be able to do was type words and tables and drop pictures in, as and when - just like you would in Microsoft Word for example - and then have some fancy programme turn all my work into HTML code that would mean you could read it on the web. I thought this should be a pretty simple thing to achieve, just shows how wrong you can be!

There are indeed such fancy programmes that exist of course, they tend to cost significant amounts of cash! I decided to look for a free version on the web. Eventually I came across KomPozer and I have to say it has proved extremely helpful, I'd have no hesitation in recommending it and have used it to help produce the pages on this site that were not created directly by Family Historian. Mind you it still isn't as straight forward as creating a document  in 'Word'!

Having got this far I started to read things about HTML standards, initially on Catherine Wooff's family history site which led me to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) site. A quote from W3C "In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as 'Web interoperability' By publishing open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation." I think this means that by encouraging and developing standards and protocols it is trying to ensure that no matter what computer you have or programmes you are using you can read, publish and share things on the WWW without technical barriers.

This seemed a good idea to me and so I determined to check my pages. Lo and behold the ones produce by Family Historian passed with flying colours - mine had a few problems! I hasten to say that these problems were not introduced by KomPozer but rather by me tinkering with the HTML code with limited knowledge & understanding! Hey but I'm learning and have now fixed things so that the pages I created pass the WC3 test - hence the little logo at the bottom of the page!

copyright

Unless stated otherwise and except as excluded in License Exclusions below, all content on this website (whether text, audio, images, source code or other original work) is licensed under a Creative Commons License and is copyrighted © 2007 by me, Chris Grice.
 
What this Means

For non-commercial, personal use you may reuse, build on, amend, download or redistribute any of the original work except for the exclusions listed below as long as you license your work in a way similar to this..

If you do use any part of the work on this site, you must provide me with credit as the originating author.

If you don't adhere to these conditions then you will be in breach of copyright and action may be taken against you.

License Exclusions

Any and all works (text or images) submitted by any other person than myself and used on this site remain the property of the submitter and will be credited as such. They retain any copyright on this work and it may not be used by any other party without their prior express permission.

Why License?

Well, I've put a lot of time & effort into compiling all the information on this site and to building the site itself of course, so I want to both protect that work and ensure that it is available for all to use and enjoy (non commercially).

My aims, therefore are twofold, firstly to ensure that the work I've put in both to finding and organising the content of this site and also to creating the actual site, is freely available for all to use and enjoy, and secondly to ensure that there can be no restrictions to, or commercial developments derived from the site, that are inconsistent with my original aim to make the content freely available to all.


Like many family historians I am always keen to find out more about our family and those individuals connected, however remotely!, to us.  Consequently I really welcome anything you can add to or correct about these pages. Please contact me with any contributions or comments. I have spent many hours sitting at a hot computer (too many for Judith's liking sometimes!) so I would really like to know what you think of the site - do you like it? don't you? How would you improve it? what would you add? would you leave anything out?

I promise that anything you contribute to the site will be attributed to you and if you think I have not done this anywhere on the site please let me know and I will rectify it.

I would particularly like to thank all those who have contributed to date and specific thanks can be found on my acknowledgments page.



Privacy

With a web site of this nature I am very aware of the need to protect the privacy of individuals particularly those people or their relatives who appear in these pages. Wiith this aim in mind I have removed all details, except first name and surname, for individuals with a birth date of 1910 or later.  If you find any information on this site related to you personally and you wish it removed please contact me and I will remove it.

If you send me any information for inclusion in this site then it is likely that I will have your email address. I undertake that I will not publish this, or indeed any other information that you wish to keep private.