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.