I spent most of the afternoon playing around with CSS and reorganizing my genealogy website. It’s tedious work, so when the mood strikes, it’s best to go with it. I found a gorgeous CC licensed image to use as a banner, which is what set me off. It was taken in County Galway, not Mayo, but they are both in the west country, so I decided to use it anyway.
And, of course, the reorganization means that the family tree page I posted last night has been moved.
I’ve been test driving a couple of different genealogy programs. One of them, Family Historian, seems to be pretty decent. The variety of reports and HTML it is able to export is far superior to the Cumberland program I’ve been using. It’s shareware, with a 30 day trial period, but the price tag isn’t bad (US$56.00).
Anyway, I’ve re-configured the Basquill family tree page. Instead of umpty confusing pages linking together, it’s all on one page, descending from Michael Basquill. I haven’t taken a close look at the documentation, but there does not appear to be an easy way to chop up one report into multiple web pages. Even with only five generations, and scant information for many of them, the report I did would have made for 9 printed pages. That’s a lot of scrolling. It would be straightforward to divide the tree by creating multiple reports, though, so it’s not a deal breaker.
Some of the text is a little goofy, because it was imported from another program. Most fields seemed to map logically to fields in the new program, but there are a few that did not, which resulted in goofy things like, “He experienced LIVD: Lived in Killadeer” or the (to me) hilariously funny repetition of “He died.”[1]
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[1] Ms. Lea might find that amusing, too. We took a humanities class together in high school, and in discussion one day, the phrase “And then he died” cropped up several times. You had to be there, I guess, but by the end of the period, everyone in the class was giggling.
I spent some time this afternoon working on scanning and transcribing a few more of Esther’s letters. The last one, from Clark, includes a newspaper clipping about the deadly train-car wreck in Piper City, Illinois.
When we are in a severe drought–and we are–it’s a really bad idea to set off fireworks in the middle of a tinder dry field. I am, apparently, surrounded by asschapeaux.
red paper boat 