Family Tree Helper
Source:
The Cousin Explainer tea towel is available for £9.95 (about 16 Canadian dollars) from Present Indicative, a gift company in Reading, England.
Other Helpful Sources
While writing a biography of my first husband as a present for my son, I developed more than a passing interest in genealogy. I have traced his family tree (Joseph from Antigua) back to a great-great-great grandfather, not an easy task when you consider that that grandfather may have been enslaved by the wicked British system. I still do not have birth dates for the earliest branches of the tree so I cannot vouch for any information which has all come to me via word of mouth from probably failing memories. I recently received information on a branch of the family from London, England, and have filled in a number of blanks.
My own family tree needs work. I have lots of information on my dad's side of the family (Rowsell from Leading Tickles, Notre Dame Bay, NL & Anstey from New Bay, Notre Dame Bay, NL) but very little on my mother's (Field from Trinity, NL & Taylor from Carbonear, NL). My great-grandmother on my maternal grandfather's side was Elizabeth White (1837-1909), whose father was a William White from Greenspond. And there the trail ends. I can find nothing more about her, or him. And googling the word "White" hits a lot of sites which have nothing to do with the surname White.
The McDermid branch of the Elliott - McDermid tree is fairly well documented. The Elliott line not as much, probably because there were/are fewer descendants to do the work required.
Several Web sites have been helpful in my various searches, providing transcribed sources such as census documents, headstone inscriptions, records of birth, baptism, marriage, and burial.
Mailing lists such as NfldRoots are valuable for those of us researching Newfoundland names:
- GenWeb mailing list - used to be a mailing list. It is now a site with non-list options.
- Roots web mailing lists
Sites which were helpful to me in researching my family names include:
- A site run by Al Beagan which had an amazing amount of Rowsell family history. The original site seems to have morphed into a very long page with loads of information. Take a lunch. And double-check anything you find unless it gives a reliable source. It's a starting point. Al Beagan's Genealogy Notes of Newfoundland
- For Pike genealogy, go to David Pike's Family History & Genealogy Resources.
Once I got started in genealogical research, I knew I needed to find a reliable database or some other software in which to store the information. After evaluating several programs I decided on Fzip Family Tree which I used for several years.
Fzip served me well until I began to do some serious genealogical research in early 2004. It just wasn't designed to handle sources for various bit of information, nor could the source information be tracked easily.
I tested Brother's Keeper which was a step up from Fzip, did the job but felt clumsy.
In February 2004 a fellow tree climber recommended Legacy Family Tree. I tested it for a few weeks before finally deciding to migrate everything over. After a remarkably short learning period, I was happy with it. Lots of bells and whistles but all of them do something useful. It is well maintained and had an extremely large user group.
A useful way to "grow a family tree" is to put it online where others can find it. All of the above programs can create rudimentary web pages from the data. For about 10 years, I used a piece of software called Gedview and although it didn't do everything I'd like it to do, it was good enough. Until it wasn't. It had a graphical interface which was very user friendly. I planned to peek into the PHP code and see if I could tweak it so that it would display general and marriage notes for each individual.
Yeah, peeking into the PHP code didn't happen, and somewhere about 2010 it stopped working well, probably because it needed a PHP upgrade. But I found that out only recently (2019). I am told that it is still good for simple searches but because I have totally forgotten how to 1) upgrade it and 2) upload a new gedcom, I will not be using it on this site.
I found some server-side genealogy software that I took a good look at. It seems to be what I can use so I have installed it. It is called TNG: The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding. It wasn't free like Gedview, but the price (as of Nov 2022 still a one-time fee) is very reasonable and so far, I like it. After a few (okay, more than a few) growing pains with getting it up and running with four different trees, I think it's ready to release to the public.
If you are browsing my family trees and find anything you think is broken, or which could use improvement, please let me know. If you have additions or corrections to my genealogical data, I want to hear from you. Send me a message by clicking on my name at the bottom of any TNG page.