What started off as a quiet week on the site turned into a crescendo.
Firstly Brenda Lawrance found the message board and got a tad excited. We love enthusiam, Brenda. I've been in touch briefly with her and will see what she has got, and in what format, soon. I know some of you may already have done so.
Then Mike Gann sent in his Gann file in .gft format. Thank's Mike. I've discovered this was produced in Family Tree 2 but am still looking for a converter to access the data.
Then Frank Miles, who is researching his Maternal grandmother's family - the Rigdens, sent in some information which seems to imply that our original on the Gedcom, George Shingleston, had a sister name of Carolyn who married into the Rigdens. I'm still trying to confirm the link from my end Frank, I'll be in touch soon.
I also had an email from some-one who wanted me to value a Dan Sherrin print he has. Considering how prolific Dan was as an artist, and how many of his pictures were printed, I've suggested that he just enjoys it and learns more about Dan which will give his print much more than just monetary value.
It seems you are enjoying the E.B. series as much as I am. I've been trying to find out more about this man. So far, but not definite, it appears that he was a War-reporter based in China before he came (back?) to Whitstable. Previously the Whitstable Times only had reporters, so his articles seem to be the first time a local was allowed to be a journalist, as one can see by reading them.
The latest edition is:
4,369 THEY ALL HAD "NICKNAMES". Four Williams on one ship. What would you call them? Too many names to list, just enjoy reading it, and then learn why.
You can find this at www.oystertown.net/wt/eb4369.html (I have made an error on the ebindex page and called it 4303, but the link works).
I had quite a chuckle as I transcribed this one but there is some useful information in it.
The OysterGedcom has been much on my mind this week. The placing of it on Rootsweb has given it a starting place on the web but only for those people who know to go to Rootsweb or Ancestry.com in the first place.
The intention was that it would attract people who weren't neccessarily family historians and that this would help provide previously unknown information.
To achieve this I've now decided, as well as keeping it updated on Rootsweb, to publish it as a site that can be directly searchable by the internet's search engine spiders. I considered putting it directly on the Oystertown site, but if I then had to move it at a later date when I needed the space back this would cause a lot of "File not found" errors.
The answer I've come up with is to host it as a sub-domain of the main site, where it gets it's own space. This means I can edit individual pages directly and have more control in general. I have programs which can bulk convert gedcom data to html pages but these don't give me enough styling options to match it and cross link it to the main site. I'm looking at some batch 'find-and-replace' utilities to enable me to do this.
If all of this leaves you a little confused then this is the intended outcome:
An internet traceable and searchable Whitstable family history database that contains all of the original notes and sources. This means that the names in the data should be found by someone entering them in Google for instance.
Family and person pages to include pictures of the people where available, or perhaps a picture of the house they lived in. Cross links between pages of the main site where these people are mentioned in listings or newspaper reports.
Links to other resources relevant to these people. For instance, died on board the Cressy in WW1 - Find about more about the Cressy.
Contact details (when requested) for people researching this person or family.
The URL will be www.ancestors.oystertown.net, but the world (except you) will not know about it until I'm ready. If you do have a look in the meantime don't expect much to work at present, it's still an experimental playground.
Have a good week.
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