A FAMILY TREE
The currenty important people in setting up these web pages:
1) YOU - These pages were built out of a labor of love. Your comments are not an intrusion but a welcome. After all, these are your families and your pages.
2) Scott Thomas (me) is currently maintaining all the HTML pages for surnames beginning with A to Z: gpyscott@yahoo.com . He (me) is the one you should email with comments or info.
3) David Thomas is providing the host web site: dave@thomas-family.org (family page: david_and janet_thomas). This is why the URL has "thomas-family" in it.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE THESE GENEALOGY PAGES
I decided that my pages will be "family" oriented instead of "person" oriented. There is a page for each family with appropriate links to the responsible families and the resulting families.
I realize that this site will be very redundant in many cases. In my searching, I found that either the information on an individual is either very skimpy or it costs money. Mine is free and I hope not too skimpy.
Things I Have Made Room For:
Personal email and web page links can also be incorporated. I would like to leave out addresses and phone numbers since they change and create a maintenance headache. The occasional personal email and web page links will be all the "changeable" info I plan to incorporate.
There is space for several paragraphs of history text. This would mostly be for "extinct" families as current families may find this information a bit too private.
A few pictures can be incorporated in sub directories. I prefer coarsely digitized photos so the space can be kept down to a minimum. A few jpegs per family would be ok. It would be better to use text for what is on the back of the photos to save on bytes.
I have left room for appropriate links to genealogical sites relevant to the family. Other genealogy sites, church records, etc. I would like this to be a good starting point for further genealogical investigations.
David currently has about 200Mb for this project. I figure that would be about 5000 families with no pictures. Plenty to wear out my current ambitions. More host sites can be used if needed but at the cost of robustness.
To make a new family page I need the names of the parents including the wifes maiden name. I put the maiden name in the actual file directory name so I would like that info it when I first setup the family directory, so I don't have to change it later. I also of course need to know how it links in with the other families. All other info, dates, children, etc, can be added at any time.
I intend to keep fairly current backups of my pages so that in case of a disaster all is not lost. Also as the site grows beyond my abilities or enthusiasm, I can pass the pages on to other people who would like to maintain them or spilt them up between multiple host sites. Either way I would like these pages to remain as a long term historical reference for my family.
Scott Thomas - January 1999