About This Site
Welcome!
Having been bitten by the genealogy bug, I have been collecting various family information, photos and records for several years now. I have designed FamilySources.com as a personal genealogy site for interests in my Adams, Davis, McCrave and Nyenhuis ancestors, just to name a few. Because I am not really following a single family line, I couldn't just pick a domain name like adams.com, davis.com, mccrave.com, or nyenhuis.com (coincidentally, none of which were available), so I had some difficulty choosing a domain name. I went with FamilySources.com because it was true to my purpose and, more importantly, because -- after hours of searching for a good domain name -- this one was actually available!
I have to admit that I can not take credit for the bulk of the information presented here. Most of what I have has been built on top of the years of data my mother collected long before I even knew what the word genealogy meant. Mom started the Family Tree Maker file during the days of the DOS Operating System. It has survived many upgrades and merges with other FTM files -- not to mention a near fatal error -- and was shared with me not too long ago. Throughout the years, relatives, distant cousins, Internet pals, as well as various online (and offline) record sources have helped fill in many of the gaps in the family tree. However, many gaps still remain. The goal of this site is to pull all of this research together in one place and in a meaningful, useful way in order to more easily share it with relatives, as well as with the hope that others might find this site and be able to help fill in some of those remaining gaps.
While one of the major goals of this site is to share information, another is to protect the privacy of living relatives. Therefore, I have made every attempt to remove the names of living persons from the database (though they may appear in some photographs). In many cases I did not have a birth or death date of an individual. If I had too little information regarding a person, I opted not to include the individual on this web site. However, if it was apparent that the person couldn't possibly be living any longer (for example, having a parent born in the early 1800s), I opted to include their name. Going through this process I whittled the Family Tree Maker file down from over 1,400 people to just under 900 individuals. In doing so, I may have eliminated some people who are no longer living and that should have been included here, but I felt it better to be safe than sorry. In any event, please feel free to contact me if you spot an error, feel someone is missing, or if you have any other comments or concerns. The last thing I want to do is make anyone uncomfortable with the information presented here.
As for the technical details... This site was built using 'The Next Generation' of Genealogy Sitebuilding (TNG), which was developed by Darrin Lythgoes. The data was exported from Family Tree Maker into the GEDCOM format (an international standard recognized by all genealogy software). Then the data is imported and stored in MySQL database tables and is dynamically displayed with PHP. All without re-typing a single piece of data from the Family Tree Maker file. Pretty amazing stuff!
Well, that's the gist of it. Please feel free to contact me if you have any comments or questions. I would love to hear from you! Thanks for dropping by!
Sincerely,
Nancy McCrave