— December 30, 2015 —

Colonial war indices — for Philip's War, the French and Indian (King William's) War, and the Revolutionary war — are accessible via the Indices button on the menu bar. Your suggestions for additional indices are solicited.

— July 21, 2014 —

Index of early Baptists. Research into Capt. Timothy/2w Brooks, a Baptist who removed his family from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to West Jersey to escape religious persecution, has prompted me to flag other Baptists in the communities where he lived. I've added an index of all these individuals in the hope that this collection of names might inspire one or another of you to work up the monograph I have long contemplated but will not complete in this lifetime. Hover your mouse over the Indices menu button to locate the Baptist index.

 

Announcer graphicSite Redesign!

— July 1, 2013 —

I'm pleased to announce completion of a massive site reconstruction. The previous two-track site consisted of a handful of external, handbuilt "wrapper" pages coexisting with thousands of genealogical person pages and illustrations which were batch-created by John Cardinal's "Second Site" web creation software. That bifurcated model has been replaced by the one-track model you now see, created entirely in Second Site and offering one-point access as well as dozens of new and improved features. The redesigned interface offers the visitor a better organized, uniform, visually cleaner, and far more intuitive experience.

Among the highlights:

  • Uniform one-point access through the "main page" (formerly a child page of the wrapper pages)
  • Standardized navigation:  An identical menu bar on each page means fewer mouse clicks required
  • Cascading submenus:  16 top menu links reduced to 7 — Reduced top-of-page clutter, simplified site navigation
  • Added powerful Site Search (by first/last name, place, dates) & Search by ID# functions available from any page
  • New Family Explorer icon on each person page displays subject's spouse(s), children, siblings, and three generations of ancestors, all hyperlinked
  • Improved Rootsweb message archive search via links from the Mailing List page
  • Linked weblog with multiple subscription and access options via any Tributaries page
  • A compact DNA Studies page, with a short but sweet "DNA 101" list of web tutorials to bring novices up to speed
  • Source highlghting on source pages — Easily find a single work within a long bibliographic page
  • Census tables show at a glance where later individuals lived in decennial census years
  • In progress:  Historical callouts (through mid-Bs of person pages), place Infopages (through letter "C")

This new site (18 months in the making) required:

  • Data review and source cleanup of close to 10,000 person records in my database for standards compliance and proper utilization of software upgrade from TMG 4.0 to TMG 8.0
  • Review and cleanup of 8,950 place entries to create an error-free, hierarchical Place List search function
  • Reconstruction or new construction of Home, News, Search, Search by ID#, Mailing List, Resources, Publications and Weblog pages and functions within a uniform user interface
  • Dozens of new protocols and procedures to ensure uniformity of data entry (personal, bibliographic, geographic), ease and flexibility of retrieval, and consistent output

Data additions:

  • Numerically, about 100 individual sketches to the person pages
  • Many more names without a person page sketch who can be found via descendant charts, child tables, the Family Explorer button, and the new Search function
  • Dozens more 4-generation descendant charts for all descendants in all lines through the 4th generations (which means that the names of their known descendants are displayed through the 7th generation).
  • Addition of thousands of gravestone photographs to the database, hundreds of them included here

Some cool retentions which return unchanged:

  • Flexible search using the Surname Index, Master Index and Place Index, as well as the new Search engine already mentioned.
  • Two methods of tracking page revisions (chronological Change Log, external Page Change Notice service)
  • Organization of disparate New England family lines via Founders Table, now on the site's landing page