It seemed like a good idea at the time; my mother had been researching her family tree for quite a while, then my wife started on hers, so I decided to join in the fun. I only had my father's side to do, and it's well known in the family that the Bennetts are all from Kent and the Plampins are all from Suffolk. He had found a Family Register page from a bible which his mother had inherited (wrongly, as it happened - they're supposed to follow the oldest daughter), so I had a head start. Except that it showed a branch in Guildford, Surrey!
I spent a while making the bible page readable, and also transcribed it. The original is here and the transcript here.
The major difficulty I could see was how to display the data. There are numerous packages for sale which record and display genealogical data, but I'm a programmer by trade, so the obvious option was to write my own, and here it is. The script (which I call 'mutants ate my Family Tree', for reasons which are unlikely to become clear any time soon) generates a single page per person, showing parents, spouse(s) and children; dates and places of birth, marriage and death; notes; links to certificate details; plus anything else I feel like adding. The little red number next to a person's name is the unique identifier in the database; I'm number 1, and the rest were entered in no particular order. (The little blue numbers on the bible page are the same.)
It turned out, of course, that the database and script was the easy part. As many before me have discovered, it's the research that's difficult.
For further information, email me. Please note that if the email subject line does not begin with the words 'Family Tree', it will be deleted unread.
