22 June 2009

Life Since 2008, Part III, Genealogy

I'm still finishing up my Medieval genealogy, but I've reached a point where I've exhausted the resources at hand. It is amazing the obscure people I have found by searching through Google Books and British History Online. During the last few weeks of school, when life at work was pretty intense, I started finding people through the Victoria County Histories on British History Online, especially in the History of Lancaster. Having searched and read through the other Victoria County Histories, I have to say that the A History of the County of Lancaster is the best of the series. I must comment that this series was edited by a man named William Farrer whose name I often find as editor of various documents that came from the British Records Office. For me, his name signals a reliable source to search through.

Now I am afraid I'm near the end of such wonderful discoveries. I'm going back to people and places that I put aside because they were very frustrating for some reason or another. For some of these folks, say for instance Nichola le Bird, wife of Peter Bulkeley, the information was right there in Ormerod's History of Cheshire. I just hadn't scoured through the index as well as I should have the last time I was looking. It is always good to go back and look through records and the web pages I have for each individual because looking back through the Bulkeley line I found new ancestors I hadn't previously found, and I found some pretty horrific mistakes. Other places, I found that something made me lose focus, and I had left entries without sufficient sources.

Since I first started dabbling in genealogy, sometime around 2003, I have used a program called Legacy. I think I began with Legacy 3 with the current version being Legacy 7. I originally was drawn to Legacy because at the time it was the only genealogy program that also created web pages. My love for html and building web pages began in 1994 when I made my first home page. My passion for researching genealogy came much later.

Legacy has proven to be a great program and its creators keep adding lots of nice "bells and whistles" to each new upgrade. It holds far more people than I could ever enter in its data base. I love the way it keeps track of sources and its flexibility to set it up to the users needs as well as the users preferences. I have mine set up with the same background that I use for my genealogy web pages. Legacy even incorporated GIS technology so you can find where in the world your ancestors lived. It would take pages to describe all the tools and uses for Legacy, in fact I'm not sure I have even begun to utilize all the great tools it has. I recommend downloading the it for trial and playing with it for a while.

I love the fact that Legacy will generate 1000s of web pages in about ten minutes, especially since I keep updating my pages. One problem is that the numbering on my source pages changes as I add new sources, which requires that I edit each new page. I don't mind this since as I said my love for html hasn't dwindled over the years. Of course if I just uploaded all new pages I wouldn't have this problem. Again, I love html, and since my second set of web page outputs, I've been editing pages and including photos. It just is easier for me to edit the new pages.

Here are some screen clips I took of my Legacy program:




Pedigree view starting with Me


Descendant view showing the descendants
of Franciso Muños - Notice that the
Sánchez de Iñigo family began in New México
with Fray Francisco Muñoz, a Franciscan priest



Family view showing my father's parents



Location Widow open and showing
Cartaya, Andulucia, España where my
ancestor Francisco Vásquez was born.



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