About This Site

Introduction

Why Family History?

I never knew my paternal grandparents, as they died long before I was born. I remember, however, hearing of them as a child and being curious to know more.

Towards the end of 2005 I decided to act on my childhood curiosity and help my father with his endeavours as he had been tracing his family roots for several years.

Why a Web Site?

By the middle of 2006 I had accumulated a wealth of information and looked for a way to present this to my father, resulting in this web site. As well sharing the information with my father I also wanted to:

Share the information I've found with other family members and fellow researchers.
Discover fellow researchers who have links with my family.
Preserve my findings for future generations of family members and researchers.

Why Stop There?

Having been well and truly bitten by the family history bug, at the beginning of 2007 I started researching my maternal family line from Scotland.

Standards

This site complies with several W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. When a page complies with a particular standard, an icon for that standard is displayed in the footer:

	All pages adhere to the W3C standard for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
	All pages, other than those created with Family Historian, adhere to the W3C standard for XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) 1.0 Strict
	Web pages created with Family Historian adhere to the W3C standard for HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) 4.01 Transitional
	All pages, other than those created with Family Historian, conform to level triple-A of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0
	This site's news feed conforms to the RSS 2.0 specification.

Why Comply with Standards?

With the continual advances in technology different means of accessing the Internet are constantly being introduced. By complying with the latest standards this web site will be accessible to as many people as possible within the constraints of current technology.

Technical Information

Some people have asked me what software I use for collating my genealogical research and building my web site. Most of the software I use is either available as a free download or given away free with computing magazines.

Genealogical Software †

	^[1]	Family Historian: This is the software package I use to store and view my family history data. Family Historian is UK-centric, offers many ways to search, sort and view the information, provides a wide range of diagrams and charts and has an active support forum.
	^[2]	Gedcom Census: This is a free tool written by a Family Historian user for use with Family Historian. Gedcom Census records census data in Family Historian census events, occupations, births and sources, and allows census images to be linked to the appropriate records.
	^[3]	Res Privata: Res Privata is a free tool that filters private data from a GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) file, allowing information on living relatives to be removed prior to sharing the information with fellow researchers or publishing on the Internet.
	^[4]	Parish Locator: This is a very useful freeware tool for locating UK parishes and other parishes in the surrounding areas.

Web Site Development †

	^[5]	1st Page 2000: I prefer the hands-on approach to designing my web pages and use 1st Page 2000 for this purpose as it provides a flexible environment for handcrafting and viewing web pages in real-time.
	^[6]	Family Historian: Family Historian provides wide-ranging options for creating family trees. All the family trees you see on this site have been created using this application.
	^[7]	Family Atlas: All the maps plotting family events, such as place of birth, were created using the genealogical mapping application Family Atlas.
	^[8]	Paint Shop Pro 5: Inevitably photographs fade or become damaged over time so Paint Shop Pro comes in handy for minor restoration to family photographs. I also use it for creating graphics or converting images for use on the site.
	^[9]	SmartDraw 6: Other than the family trees, all other charts are created using the drawing package SmartDraw.
	^[10]	WS_FTP: I use the FTP (File Transfer Protocol) tool WS_FTP for uploading completed pages to the site.
	^[11]	Xenu's Link Sleuth: It's a very time consuming task to manually check that all links on the site are working. Xenu automates this process, highlighting any broken links that require fixing or, in the case of links to external sites, removing.