Family History Help

Welcome to the history of the Linsley family!

Each person in the history has a page describing him or her. Most of the files are generated automatically. The term "current individual" means the person whose page is currently being viewed. If this help file, a family overview or other document is being viewed, there is no current individual.

Names

All persons are listed by birth name. Persons who are known to exist, but whose names are unknown, are given placeholder names. A person with an unknown surname is given the surname '?'. An unknown given name may be a number, or it may be of the form "X's relation," where X is the name of another person in the history, and relation is husband, wife, father or mother. For example, if John Smith was known to have married a woman named Jane, she would appear in the history as "Jane ?." If, on the other hand, his wife's name was not known at all, she would be named "John Smith's Wife ?." Their children might be "115 Smith" and "116 Smith."

Individuals are grouped into families by surname; pages for each surname are given a distinctive background color or texture (only visible, of course, with browsers that support background colors or textures). A few families also have an overview page giving information about the family as a whole.

Navigation Bar

Most pages have a navigation bar near the bottom to facilitate moving around in the history. Each item in the navigation bar also has a corresponding text link, which can be used by non-graphical browsers, as well as serving as a hint to the meaning of the items in the navigation bar. The items in the navigation bar are described below.

Not all navigation items are on every page. Only those items which are applicable to a particular page will appear on that page.

HOME Go to my home page.
FAMILY
HISTORY
HOME 		Go to family history introduction page.
PERSON
INDEX 		Go to the index of all persons mentioned in this family history.
SURNAME
INDEX 		Go to the index of all surnames mentioned in this family history. The surname index contains links to the beginning of each surname in the person index.
SOURCE
INDEX 		Go to the list of all source documents used in compiling this history. You can also get to the source index by following any source reference link on a document page.
FAMILY
OVERVIEW 		Go to the overview of this family (surname), if it exists. Only a few major families have overviews.
ROOT Go to the root of this family, that is, the first person in the history with this surname. This person is normally the ancestor of all other persons in the history with the same surname. (If there are persons with the same surname which do not share a common ancestor, there is no single root. In this case, this link will take you to a page which will present a choice of root individuals.) This link will be unavailable if the current person's surname is unknown, or if there is no current person.
BRANCH Go to the person who connects this family with the Linsley family.

This is the most complicated of the navigation aids to explain. An example is probably the best way to illustrate how this link works:

Suppose the current person is Nancy Dixon. Following this link remains at Nancy Dixon, since she is the most direct connection between the Dixon and Linsley families. (She also happens to be the only Dixon in the history.) Nancy Dixon married Thomas Law.

Following this link from Thomas Law's page takes you to Martha Flora Law, who married Albert Jenkins Hardman.

Following this link from Albert Jenkins Hardman's page takes you to Iva Dale Hardman, who married Ralph Bonney Linsley.

There may be cases in which there is no single "branch" individual. This will occur if there are persons with the same surname which do not share a common ancestor, and may be true if there are multiple marriages between this family and other families in the history. In this situation, this link will present you with a choice of possible "branch" individuals.

MAIL ME
COMMENTS 		Send me e-mail, if your browser supports the "mailto" function.
HELP Display this help file.

Abbreviations

A few abbreviations are used in this history, particularly in describing dates. These abbreviations are defined by the GEDCOM standard. Currently GED2HTML outputs dates exactly as they appear in the GEDCOM file; eventually, it would be desirable to modify it to translate these standard abbreviations into English equivalents, but this is more difficult than it first appears.

ABT About.
AFT After. Used for events which occurred on a single, specific date, but the date is not accurately known.
ABT About.
AGED The person's age when the event occured; used when the actual date is not known. According to the GEDCOM specification, this really should be in an "age at event" record, rather than a date record, but neither my genealogy software, nor GED2HTML currently support "age at event" records.
BEF Before. Used for events which occurred on a single, specific date, but the date is not accurately known.
BET date 1 AND date 2 Between. Used for events which occurred on a single, specific date, but the date is not accurately known.
CAL Calculated from some other date.
EST Estimated.
FROM The condition persisted from the given date onward.
FROM date 1 TO date 2 The condition persisted from date 1 to date 2.
TO The condition persisted until the given date.

Person Index

This is an alphabetic list of everyone in the family history. The person's name is a link to his or her information page. The list includes the person's dates of birth and death, which are helpful in distinguishing between people with the same name. Living persons are not included in the index unless access has been granted through password mechanism described in Privacy of Living Persons. Note that living persons may not appear in the index, even if access has been granted. Access to data about living persons may be granted on an individual-by-individual basis, but the index is all-or-nothing. Unless access has been granted to the entire database, all living individuals will still be lift out of the index.

Surname Index

This is an alphabetic list of all the surnames which appear in the family history. The name is a link into the person index, to the first person in the index with that surname. Eventually, I would like each entry in the surname index to include a count of the number of people with that surname in the family history, but the program which generates the indices does not yet support that feature.

Family Overview Pages

A few families have a page which gives an overview of the family as a whole. These exist only for the families about which a substantial amount of information is known. They include a family tree and list of "important" individuals in the family. ("Important," in this sense, means that a substantial amount is known about the person, he or she is the ancestor of a significant branch of the family, or is the connection to another important family. It is not practical to include every person in the family tree; it would become too big. Nor is it necessary to include every person in the list; they are in the index.) A colored border around a person in the family tree indicates that significant information is known about his or her spouse's family.

The family tree is a clickable image map which can be used to move through the history (if your browser supports image maps).

Generally, the overview page also describes where the family came from, how they are related to other families in the history, and sources of more information about the family.

Individual Pages

Each person's page contains several sections. Not every page will contain all of the sections, since some information about the person may be unknown, or there may be no information for the section (e.g., information about a person's spouse and children will not appear if the person never married and had no children).

The first part of every page is a header identifying the individual, followed by a photograph or portrait of the person, if one is available. There may also be links to additional pictures of the person and/or his or her family. Next is a modified pedigree chart (family tree) showing the person's parents, siblings, spouse(s) and children, if known. Following the pedigree chart is a description of the person's family. Next is a listing of significant events in the person's life, including birth and death dates and locations, if known; these are listed in chronological order, to the extent possible. A section containing general notes and comments on the person's life is followed by links to additional information about the person. Finally, there is a navigation bar to facilitate moving around in the history.

The modified pedigree chart shows three generations centered on the current individual, and includes the siblings, as well as the parents and children of the current individual. It shows graphically where you are in the family. It is also a clickable image map which can be used to move through the history (if your browser supports image maps).

The format of the chart is intended to be intuitive. Each person on the chart is represented as a "button." The style and color of the button gives some information about the person, as described below:

A button which appears raised, and which has blue lettering, indicates a link to another person. Following this link will take you to the page for that person.
A button which also has a 3-D appearance, but with the highlights and shadows reversed, and which has bold, red lettering, represents a button which is already pressed. This is the current person. Following this link has no effect (other than, possibly, causing the browser to reload the current document).
A button which is flat, and which has black lettering, indicates a person about whom so little is known that he or she does not have a separate page. All known information about the person is included in the current document. This is not a link; attempting to follow it will have no effect.
A button which is rectangular indicates a male.
A button which has rounded corners indicates a female.
A button which has angled corners indicates a person whose sex is unknown.

The color of the button indicates the generation to which the person belongs. The parents of the current individual are silver colored. Gold indicates the same generation as the current individual: the current individual, spouses and siblings. Spouses have a slightly wider border than siblings. A bronze color indicates children of the current individual.

Relationships between the persons are shown by the connecting lines. Husband-wife relationsips are indicated by a horizontal line connecting the sides of the buttons. Husbands are always on the left; wives on the right. Parent-child relationships are shown by a vertical line descending from the center of the parents' horizontal connecting line. The vertical line meets a horizontal line which connects all of the children of these parents; vertical lines connect this line to the top center of each child's button. If the current person had more than one spouse, this is shown by a continuation of the vertical line through the row of child buttons to another horizontal line to the side of the additional spouse; children from this spouse are drawn in a row below the spouse.

Note that the pedigree chart only shows full siblings of the current person. To get to half- or step-siblings, it is necessary to go to the common parent, then to the desired child of that parent.

Following the pedigree chart is a description of the person's family. It begins with the person's parents, including their birth and death dates, if known. Next comes the person's spouse, if any; events related to the marriage, such as marriage and divorce dates and locations; and any children resulting from the marriage. This is repeated if the person had more than one spouse.

The family description can also be used to move around in the history. The names of the persons are links to their pages. They may be used by browsers which do not support using the pedigree chart as an image map, or simply if it happens to be more convenient. (Some of the pedigree charts are quite large, and may require scrolling the window to move the desired person into view.)

Unlike the pedigree chart, the family description does not include the current person's siblings. This is a limitation of the program which generates the Web pages; it may be fixed eventually. In the mean time, a sibling may be reached by following the link to one of the person's parents, then to the desired sibling.

The general notes about the person may be followed by links to additional information. In particular, ahnentafels are automatically generated for each person. Two versions of the ahnentafels are produced. One is a plain-text version which may be downloaded; the other is a hypertext document which can also be used as a convenient way to move around in the family history.

(Many of the ahnentafels are uselessly trivial, where only one or two generations of a family, or even a single individual, are known, and may be eliminated in future revisions of the family history.)

Finally, there is a navigation bar to facilitate moving around in the history. This is described above.

Throughout each individual and family history page, there may be links to additional information. Square brackets enclosing letters and/or numbers, e.g. [S1], designate source documents used in compiling this history. If the reference is associated with an event, the source contains additional information about the event; if it is in the header, it indicates a document which was used as the source for most or all of the information about the current individual. A small camera is a link to pictures of the person or event.

Privacy of Living Persons

The database from which these pages are created contains information about people who are still alive. To protect their privacy, access to information about them is limited. Generally, the person's relationship to other family members is shown, but his or her name and other personal data is omitted.

Additional information about living persons may be made available to family members or legitimate genealogical researchers with a reasonable need for the information. Access to the infomation may be obtained by supplying an user ID and password. Access may be granted to the entire database, or to selected portions of it. If you need access to this information, write to me. Tell me who you are and why you need the information. If I am satisfied with your answers, I will set up an ID and password for you.

Using the SEARCH Functon

The family history can be searched to find people who meet a wide variety of criteria. Both simple and complex searches are possible. (The actual search engine is the same in both cases; the only difference is the complexity of the form which submits the search.) Both simple and advanced searches offer a choice of how the persons' data are compared to the search string (although the forms ask the question a little differently).

Searching will only work if your browser supports fill-in forms.

By default, searching is case insensitive. Upper- and lower-case letters are treated as equal. Searching may be made case-sensitive by selecting the appropriate box on the form.

Simple Searches

The simple search allows you to search for all people for whom a single piece of information matches the search string.

Example searches:

To search for all people born in West Virginia:
Search for persons whose
To search for all people with a given name of John:
Search for persons whose
This will match "John," "John Charles," or "Robert John," but not "Jonathon."
To search for all people with John or Jonathon as a first name, but not as a middle name:
Search for persons whose
This will match "John," "John Charles," or "Jonathon," but not "Robert John."
To search for all people with John as a first name, and who have no middle name:
Search for persons whose
This will match "John," but not "John Charles," "Jonathon" or "Robert John."
To search for all people who are still alive:
Search for persons whose

Advanced Searches

The advanced search allows searching for multiple criteria. It is possible to select only those people who match all of the specified criteria, or everyone who matches any of the criteria, or a combination. Note that matching occurs in order, from top to bottom; it is not currently possible to group criteria. (A and B) or (C and D) is not possible.

Regular Expressions

"Regular expressions" are patterns used by many text-processing programs to search for text. They represent a set or range of text values which may match the pattern. They may contain a choice of words, as in the John or Jonathon example above, or unknown or unspecified characters, for example, to find references to Cleveland, OH, when there may be the name of a county between the city and state. This search engine uses regular expressions in the style of Perl.

The use of regular expressions provides a powerful and sophisticated tool for searching. The full power of regular expressions is supported by this search facility. However, only a few features are likely to actually be useful in this context; these are explained below.

a Any character which is not one of the special characters described below matches that character. A special character may be made ordinary by preceding it with a \ (backslash).
\a A few alphanumeric characters may be made special by preceeding them with a backslash. The most important of these are described below; in most other cases, the backslash is ignored.
\b Word boundary (except in [...], where it means backspace).
\d Any digit. Equivalent to [0-9].
\D Any non-digit. Equivalent to [^0-9].
\n Newline character.
\s Any whitespace character (space, tab, newline).
\S Any non-whitespace character.
\t Tab character.
\w Any "word" character (alphanumeric plus _). Equivalent to [0-9A-Za-z_].
\W Any non-word character. Equivalent to [^0-9A-Za-z_].
. The period matches any character, except newline.
[abc] A character class is a set of characters enclosed within square brackets. It matches any single character from the set. If the first character in the set is ^ (caret), the sense of the comparison is reversed; the pattern matches any character not in the set. If a - (hyphen) separates two characters in the set, it represents a range from the first through the second character; the second must be "greater than" the second. A literal - may be included in the set by making it the first or last character in the set. A literal ] (closing square bracket) may be included in the set by making it the first character in the set (except for ^). A literal ^ may be included in the set by making it any character other than the first.
(...) An expression in parentheses matches whatever the expression would match without the parentheses, but it is treated as a group for the repitition and alternation operators.
? A character, character class or parenthesized sub-expression followed by a question mark matches zero or one instances of the character, class or sub-expresion. That is, the character, class or sub-expresion is optional.

Example:
Joh?n would match John or Jon (or Jonathon, since nothing indicates that the n must be the end of a word).

* A character, character class or parenthesized sub-expression followed by an asterisk matches zero or more instances of the character, class or sub-expresion.

Example:
Joh*n would match the same things as the previous example, but would also match Johhn.

+ A character, character class or parenthesized sub-expression followed by an asterisk matches one or more instances of the character, class or sub-expresion.

An example combining several of the previous features:
Joh?a?n+ would match Jon, John, Joan, Johan, or Johann. (For a way to eliminate matching Joan, see the following example.)

| The vertical bar indicates a choice of two alternatives.

Examples:
John|Fred would match either John or Fred.
Jo(hn|nathon) would match either John or Jonathon. Jo(h?|ha)n+ would match Jon, John, Johan, or Johann, but not Joan.

^ Match the beginning of the string.

Example:
^John would match John Charles, but not Robert John.

$ Match the end of the string.

Example:
John$ would match Robert John, but not John Charles.

Some additional examples:
Jon would match Jon or Jonathon.
Jon\w would match Jon Edward, but not Edward Jon, since there is no whitespace at the end of the string.
Jon\b would match Jon Edward or Edward Jon.
Jon$ would match Robert Jon, but not Jon Charles or Jonathon.

Badly Formatted Pages

This document is designed using features supported by recent Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator 2.0, Netcom Netcruiser or Microsoft Internet Explorer. If these pages appear badly formatted, e.g. things which look like they should be lined up in columns are not aligned, you are using a browser which does not support HTML tables. All the information should be visible to you, but it may be difficult to read. Consider upgrading to a more recent Web browser.

BACK Does Not Work

This problem should be fixed. If you still have a problem, please let me know.

If you have any questions or suggestions for making this history easier to use, or if you have additional information about any person in this history, please contact me at genealogy@linsley.best.vwh.net.

HOME FAMILY
HISTORY
HOME		 PERSON
INDEX		 SURNAME
INDEX		 SOURCE
INDEX		 SEARCH MAIL ME
COMMENTS		 HELP

This page last updated Friday, 21-Feb-2003 22:07:58 GMT. Copyright © 1996, 1997, 2001 Charles E. Linsley. This file may be freely distributed over the Internet for non-commercial use. All other rights reserved.

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