This blog is for telling the world at large, and anyone else who might be interested, what’s happening with the research into our family tree.
Sylvia says: Danny 1st wrote this article when he created the blog in May 2009 and now I find that what he gave in statistics then is way out of date – if you look at the year list you will see how much the tree has grown over the last 4 years and it’s still growing
Dan says: My paternal grandfather, Abe, started keeping a record of the family tree just after WW2 on a rolled up piece of parchment. I don’t think there were many documents that went along with it, just a tree written on a scroll of paper, with amendments and additions scribbled in using different coloured pens over the years.
Fast forward to about 1989/1990, and my parents get themselves computerised. A PC with a 486 processor, running DOS and Windows 3.1. Those were the days! My mum used it to design knitting patterns, my dad started putting the family tree on it. He used a program called Brother’s Keeper, a DOS-based program that was, by today’s standards, very basic. I was amazed to find that it’s still going (http://www.bkwin.org)
When I got myself a PC in about 1996, I bought a Windows based genealogy program called Family Origins. The idea of storing photos and documents on the database started about this time, and I worked with dad to collate the information we had so far. Sylvia got more involved in family tree research after she got her first laptop in (we think) 1999. Now that there were three of us gathering information it made sense to keep to the same conventions!
Family Origins evolved into RootsMagic, which we still use today. At the time of writing there are over 8000 individuals on the database, with about 3000 photos and documents stored. The family tree blog and the online tree started in 2006, and now we have nearly 70 subscribers to the site. (The number of subscribers now tops over 100)
Here’s an indication of how the tree has grown over the years. Various nieces, nephews, grandchildren etc were added to the tree as soon as they were born, so we can tell from their ID number how many people were in the database at that time:
Oct 1995 – 1241 people
Mar 1997 – 1673 people
Dec 1998 – 1734 people
Oct 1999 – 1772 people
Feb 2001 – 2232 people
May 2002 – 2767 people
Sep 2003 – 4043 people
Jan 2004 – 4292 people
Dec 2006 – 5571 people
Apr 2008 – 6490 people
May 2009 – 8035 people
Jul 2011 – 10488 people
Oh, and mum still uses the computer to design knitting patterns… (not sure if this is still true)
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