Frequently Asked Questions.
- What is this web site?
- It is a site of over 4000 pages produced by a computer program, SFHR,
written by Duane Bristow of Albany, Kentucky to build a database of
information about people?
- Why so many pages?
- The program produces one to three web pages for each person in the database
and at the time of this writing the database contains information on about
1600 individuals.
- What kind of information is kept in the database?
- Relationships among individuals, social, family, and historical, as well as
for each person, name, sex, birth and death dates, profession, places of
birth, death, and interment, pictures, documents, videos, education, physical
characteristics, contact data, education and work history, life history and
significant events in life and can also include health and financial
histories. It also can include research notes and sources for the
information.
- What is the structure of the web site?
- It begins with an index page which contains links to other pages about the
subject and links to interesting pages on the site showing how various data is
handled by the system as well as history pages for three centuries and for
twelve decades and birthday and anniversary lists. The index page also lists
all the individual people in the database identified by name, sex and birth
date. These names are listed first alphabetically and then by date of birth.
The index page and each individual page are fully linked so that if you go to
one page and find, for instance, a name of a father or spouse or friend of a
person, you can click on that name to go to that person's page.
- What is the best way to navigate this web site then?
- You can start with the index and either browse to find what you are interested
in or use your browser's find function to find a name of a person. Click on
the link to that page to discover information about that person and then click
on other links from there to follow relationship lines. Each page has a link
to return to the index or use your browsers back function to return the way
you came.
- Why are there one to three pages for each individual?
- The first page is the main page for the person showing immediate ancestors
back to grandparents and descendents to grandchildren as well as social
relationships. education, profession or life description, important events in
life and notes, documents, pictures, audio and video, if available. It also
shows physical descriptions and contact information. The main page may have
links to pages showing the ancestor and descendent tree of the individual and
a web of family and social relationships. It also will probably have a link
to the history of the individual's life showing for each year of his age what
happened in his family and to his friends and aquaintances and in national and
world history giving an overview of the course of his life from birth to
death.
- Why was this computer program developed?
- Because for the first 25 or 30 years of his life Duane Bristow had collected
and been given much genealogical information and it was kept as a collection
of papers in boxes and envelopes. In that format it was hard to analyse and
find relationships so he wrote the program as a way of organizing such
information and then, when the internet developed, expanded the program to
produce web pages as well as written reports.
- How often are the web pages updated?
- As I receive new information I update the database and then when I have a
number of updates I generate new web pages and put them on the internet. It
takes about half an hour to generate new web pages and about two to three
hours to upload all the new pages to the internet, so I usually only update
the web site once every month or two unless large amounts of new information
are received at once.
- Tell me more about the SFHR computer program?
- See the description here
Last revised 11/17/12.