www.itowler.com - Ian's Home on the web

So I have been working on the family tree site a bit lately, and I have made a few changes.  Some of the changes are minor and some are not.  To start with, I have changed the theme to one that suits my liking a little better.  

I have also worked on the "landing page" or Homepage of the site by adding a few new items.  The first thing that I added was a "Welcome and Hello" block.  I am not sure why it never occurred to me before, but I have never had one of these up until now.  The Welcome and Hello block appears on the top left hand side of the screen, and features a Towler / Toler crest.   It explains a bit about the site and what is going on.  One of the features I like about the block is that I have it setup to show you the most recent "numbers" for the family tree, I.e. how many families, Individuals etc.  These are dynamically (automatically when there is a change) updated which is cool.

I know that I am behind on my posting, but I am trying to keep up.  It's actually a lot hard than you might think.  This post will be a little "light" but oh well.  There have been a couple of interesting things that are going on with the family tree, so I figure that I would fill you in.

While I have a goal of having 2650 people in my tree by years end (and I think that this can be done) I have a bigger goal of getting the tree Documented in an appropriate manner. To that end I have spent a great deal of time recently cleaning up the sources I use in my tree. One of the efforts that I have undertaken is attaching images to the sources If I have them. This is useful for a number of reasons, First off, you no longer have to leave the family tree section of the webpage to see a document, now you can view it along side the individual that the record pertains to. For the record, most of my sources are United States census records, and as such I have named the file using the year of the census followed by the head of the Household.

I was looking back at some old emails to try to figure out when I actually started to get interested in genealogy. The earliest record that I could find was an email that I sent to an aunt in early February, 2001. That means that I have been doing this off and on now for about 7 years. In the very beginning I can remember being very frustrated because I was not making ANY progress at all. I could not even get my an agreement on my paternal grand fathers name or birth place. I vaguely remember trying for a little bit and then setting it aside, I was in grad school and was pretty busy at the time. In July of 2002, I was getting married. The wedding provided an event for my Fathers family to get together. In the days leading up to the wedding, my Uncle Phil gave me a file that contained some of the information that he had gathered on the family.