Frequently Asked Questions

The Journal is a series of articles in chronological order documenting my family history research. These articles often link to additional information published on this website or external websites.

The Gallery is a collection of photographic albums:

Family Photographs

People
Places
Churches
Headstones

Family Photographs contains scanned images from our family collections. The other albums are from my personal collection of photographs I have taken during my family history research.

Family tree links to jacklin.info and ashforth.info. These sites use PhpGedView to present both lines of my family.

Progenitors provides a simple overview of my immediate ancestors complete with dates of birth and death if known.

Profiles provides a link to a profile page for each ancestor I have researched. This profile page provides a number of 'quick links' to:

Family Tree
Family Group
Birth Certificate
Marriage Certificate
Death Certificate
Snippets
Photographs

Timelines uses a Drupal module which in turn uses scripts developed for the SIMILE project at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Timeline can be dragged horizontally and can be populated with data by pointing it to an XML file.

Places is a category tag used to label a Journal article. Whenever a place is referenced in a Journal article then it is tagged with that place name. These tags are listed in the right-hand sidebar under the heading Places. Clicking on a place will display all articles in which that place is cited.

Surnames is a category tag used to label a Journal article. Whenever a surname is referenced in a Journal article then it is tagged with that surname. These tags are listed in the right-hand sidebar under the heading Surnames. Clicking on a surname will display all articles in which that surname is cited.

Most of the software applications and scripts in use on this site have one thing in common: they extract data from a GEDCOM file and display it in a more suitable format.

Heavyweight applications such as The Next Generation Genealogy and PhpGedView are very good at presenting huge amounts of data in many different formats but can be difficult to navigate, whereas the smaller Perl scripts gedcomToHTML and mkfamweb provide simple HTML pages that are very easy to navigate.

mkfamweb creates a set of family groups sheets in HTML format suitable for publishing genealogy data on a web site. It is written in the Perl programming language.

In this instance I use mkfamweb to extract family groups from my JACKLIN / ASHFORTH GEDCOM and publish them as HTML pages. These are then imported into Drupal using the ImportHTML module coded by dman.

The end result is several hundred interlinked HTML pages displayed as family groups. These pages are accessible from the primary menu 'Family Groups'.

gedcomToHTML is a free program for converting a GEDCOM genealogical database into HTML files suitable for publishing on a web page. It is written in the Perl programming language.

In this instance I use gedcomToHTML to extract individual users from my JACKLIN / ASHFORTH GEDCOM and publish them as HTML pages. These are then imported into Drupal using the ImportHTML module coded by dman.

The end result is several hundred interlinked HTML pages displayed as simple graphical family tree branches. These pages are accessible from the primary menu 'Individuals'.

TNG is an abbreviation for The Next Generation of Genealogy Site Building.

"The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding© ("TNG") is a powerful way to manage and display your genealogy data on the Internet, all without generating a single page of HTML. Instead, your information is stored in MySQL database tables and dynamically displayed in attractive fashion with PHP (a scripting language)."

This software application extracts data from a GEDCOM and display it in an easy to navigate format. The GEDCOM data on this site is best viewed using TNG Genealogy. The easiest way to access TNG Genealogy is by creating an account at this site, though users without an account can still access data by clicking on the TNG Genealogy link and using the drop down menus 'Find', 'Media' and 'Info'.

Drupal is an open source Content Management System or CMS.

"Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website."

Family History Journal is powered by Drupal.

PhpGedView is another open source software application using the scripting language PHP and the databse engine MySQL.

"PhpGedView is a free, collaborative genealogy program that allows you to view and edit your genealogy online. PhpGedView has full editing capabilities, full privacy controls and support linking to multimedia files such as images and videos. Your latest genealogy information is always available online for others to see."

PhpGedView powers jacklin.info and ashforth.info

"GEDCOM is an acronym for GEnea-logical Data COMmunication.

"GEDCOM is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. GEDCOM was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as an aid to genealogical research.

A GEDCOM file is plain text (usually either ANSEL or ASCII) containing genealogical information about individuals, and meta data linking these records together. Most genealogy software supports importing from and/or exporting to GEDCOM format. However, some genealogy software programs incorporate the use of proprietary extensions to the GEDCOM format, which are not always recognized by other genealogy programs. The GEDCOM TestBook Project evaluates how well popular genealogy programs conform to the GEDCOM 5.5 standard. Additionally, many tools exist to convert GEDCOM files to HTML pages." - Wikipdeia

Most of the genealogical data on this site is extracted from my JACKLIN / ASHFORTH family GEDCOM and is created using Personal Ancestral File (PAF). In order to facilitate research, data is presented in several different formats using various software applications and scripts.