New Features

A genealogy software upgrade with new features gave me an excuse to take a break from my backwards review for a little play time.  Earlier this evening, I uploaded an update to my website that shows off some of these features.

The software now makes it a lot easier for me to create pull-down menus, so I added a Photographs button that includes links to photo pages for people by family lines, cemetery markers, places and buildings, and documents.  These pages were there before, but you can now get to them a little faster from any page.

I already had monthly calendars showing births, marriages and deaths separated by my primary lines:  Kuhn, Harris, Church and Aston.  The new Calendars button includes links to those four calendars as well as a link to the newest "Today in History" calendar, which includes all four lines on a day-by-day basis.

One more new feature is the expansion of the old Pop-Up Pedigree into what is now called the Family Explorer.  Many of the pages for individual persons included an image link that opened a pop-up window showing the parents and grandparents of that person in a pedigree format.  That image has been replaced by a new one that opens up a pop-up window that includes parents, siblings, spouses and children - hence the name Family Explorer!

I tried to include the two images for the old and new pedigree windows ... but Blogger won't let me add them right now.  Maybe later.  Using my grandfather's page, notice the red box underneath his name and above his parents - clicking that box will open his pedigree.

After a few more tweaks, I'll be resuming my backwards review.  Back to work!

Where was he buried?

I noticed a few days ago that some of the burial sentences weren't looking quite right on my website - turned out that a setting in my software had gotten changed and the result was that the names of the cemeteries were being left out of the sentences.  Now who on earth could have changed that setting?  So I corrected the setting and updated the site; the burial sentences are reading much better now.

Just in case you're wondering ... my backwards review has continued, and I'm now back to ID# 1250 (from 1526).  I just updated the website again to reflect the latest corrections I've been making.  Check out the Recent Updates page to see links to the folks who have had changes made.

Henry Church and Hannah Keine

If you read my last post, you'll be glad to know that my backwards trek through my database has progressed from person ID# 1644 to 1526.  Is it appropriate to say I progressed when I'm actually moving backward???  Hmmm.

Well, whatever it should be called, it's a little slower than I had hoped, but hopefully it is worth the wait.  I've done a lot of work on my pages for Henry "Old Hundred" Church and his wife, Hannah Keine, the founders of Hundred, West Virginia.  I updated the info about their births to include more about my thoughts regarding some of the various alternatives that I have found.  I hope you'll check them out!

Cobwebs Be Gone ... and Backwards It Is!

Considering that my last blog post was in October, it's a good thing that working on genealogy isn't dependent on writing new posts!

Blogging is a lot harder than it looks.
It takes time.
It takes ideas.
It takes creativity.
It takes dedication.
It takes more than I've been willing to give it the past few months.  An idea would pop into my brain, I would think about what I might write, then I would promptly move on to other things and another day/week/month would go by.  Sigh.

So winter passed and it's now spring ... time to start anew.  Shake off the cobwebs, so to speak.

Last October I thought I had a "substantial portion" of cleanup on my website done ... but I later discovered it wasn't as done as I thought it was!  I found some issues that required changing the way I was inputting parental and birth info.  It was one of those "back to the drawing board" moments that set me back considerably.

I'm now working backwards one person at a time through the folks that appear online.  I thought I would try working backward instead of forwards to see if it would help with momentum.  And I think it's actually working!

The technicalities involved with getting my website formatted the way I want have been more difficult than I expected.  The review I've been working on for months has started and stopped and started and stopped way too many times.  This time though I've made it from person ID# 2752 backwards through ID# 1644 making updates and corrections.  That may not mean much to you, but I'm quite pleased to have finally gotten this far.

I'm off to upload the latest updates to the website ... be sure to check out the Recent Updates and the New Persons Added.  Then I'll resume where I left off with my review.  If backwards is what works, then backwards it is!