I thought I'd follow up the question on what systems people have by a
note on how I use my system.
I suspect it will be quite a different usage pattern to many of you
who earn a living from computing.
Since I retired from being a Novel sysadmin my computing interest has
concentrated on research initially into my immediate family background
then this broadened into researching a whole community based on the
village of Kingsclere where my Mother's family came from.
I got into the family history lark just about the right time as it is
only in recent years that data has been available firstly on
microfiche then CDs and now on the internet. Genealogy software has
been around for quite some time with the unix package Lifelines being
an early one but the majority of packages have been windows ones and
even today there are only a few Linux based ones (geneweb and gramps
being the two that spring readily to mind)
So my working day starts with me checking what packages have been
upgraded overnight, I use cron-apt to check and download any new
packages so my first task is to run 'aptitude upgrade'. Today only
mplayer was upgraded, yesterday none, two packages are being 'held'
I then check my emails, I am subscribed to several genealogy mailing
lists as well as HantsLUG (the noisiest one). I often get emails
from people who have found my "Kingsclere Families" website at
http://startx.co.uk/Kingsclere and have comments to make, corrections
to offer and yesterday two people sent me 'gedcoms' containing
details of their families for me to include on the site.
Depending on what is included in the files (gedcoms are intended to
be a universal format which any genealogy package can use) I may be
able to incorporate the data in a few hours or it might take several
days. I still have an outstanding MSWord document running to 35 pages
of data which includes details of families who emigrated from the
Kingsclere area to Canada, the US and Australia.
I use windowmaker with 6 workplaces set up, I run one application in
each workplace so have Konsole with normally 3 tabs open; user, root
and root mc in WP1. Sylpheed-claws-gtk2 run in WP2, Opera in WP3 and
Acrobat reader in WP4. Openoffice wil open in WP5 if a need to use
it and I have the spare WP6 to run xzgv or The Gimp for any image
viewing.
Opera usually has multiple tabs open giving me widows onto my local
geneweb database which runs on a system doing nothing else and
accessed via a URL in the form
http://ip address:2317/Kingsclere with
the last part variable as I have several databases.
Also open in tabs are 3 websites I regularly use, Ancestry.co.uk
for access to the census images 1841-1901and various other sources
they make available by subscription. FreeBMD which gives free
access to many of the birth marriages and death registrations from
1837 to 1910ish. Later registrations are available on Ancestry but
not all indexed and finally I always have open a 'window' onto the
International Genealogy Index provided by the Mormons which in some
cases can give provide records back to the 1500s
Loaded into Acrobat reader are the Hampshire Births, Marriage and
Death indexes compiled by the Hampshire Genealogy Society and
published on CD in pdf format. I copied the files to my hard drive
for ease of access.
So when I start research on a particular person, depending on when he
was born, I will probably enter his name into the search page for
the Census data and see what comes up. Since the data is in the
form of images I am unable to copy and paste so make extensive use
of scrap pads to copy by hand before typing the data into an html
form in geneweb. (the pdf files are all copy protected so I have to
use the same process with them).
Once I have a family entered into the database I then start
searching for source data, birth/baptism dates, marriages dates, If
the family actually came from Kingsclere village itself I have the
Parish Registers on microfiche so can see what was actually
written down at the time.
It can take me a day or two or three to work through a family in this
way, checking firstly for parents of an individual then looking for
siblings and grandparents. With luck I will get back several
generations but frequently get stuck in the late 1700s simply
because I don't have easy access to data earlier than that.
I then start looking for marriages of the siblings and getting their
descendants and their marriages and descendants plus ancestors of
spouses so that in the end being asked to look into one individual
can result in me finding dozens of connections.
Sometimes of course someone else has done the research and has sent
me a file containing the results but I always try to check from the
sources I have that the data is correct. Too often people find online
a tree that looks as though it fits their family and incorporate it
into their line without checking it . Americans have a bad reputation
for doing this as they 'all' want to be a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers.
I currently have 34,000 names in the database but suspect this is
only a small percentage of what it could be.
Of course there are 'real' researchers out there who consider my
efforts to be half-baked as I don't do proper annotation of my
sources. Geneweb is limited in this respect and ideally I should have
used a 'proper' database which would enable proper cross-referencing
of data but setting up such a database is not a trivial matter and
there was a long discussion about this some time back on the gramps
mailing list.
One reason I chose GeneWeb is that is designed as a web server so it
powers my 'Kingsclere Families' website. It is also powers the
Geneanet website which my wife uses to host her online family tree.
So my usage of the computer is purely as a genealogy tool and the
packages I use have this in mind. I don't need music, video, tv, mp3,
etc, etc and find things like that a distraction.
--
John Lewis
Debian Linux with Geneweb genealogy application
