For the past month I’ve been working on improving this site and genster, the program that generates it from my Gramps database. I’ve removed the dependency on the Hugo site generator which gives me more control over the templates and simplifies them a great deal.

This has also allowed me to add in more cross referencing. My goal has always to create a narrative about family history, to try and make it more than simply a dry list of names, dates and places. I want to weave together research, theories, speculation and evidence to present the best picture of my family history I can. I also want to make it more engaging for members of my family who aren’t quite as obsessed as I am!

My early conception of what I wanted was quite wiki-like and in the early 2000’s I was keeping research notes in a desktop wiki (ZimWiki I think) and I could transclude sources into a research narrative. Mentioning a census entry could bring a text transcription of it into the current page with a link to the original to delve deeper. I’ve been thinking how I could steer this site more in that direction.

In the meantime I’ve been improving linking together of the different types of content. The tag pages now group together people, stories, diary entries and questions: for example.

I’ve added summaries for diary entries to make it easier to browse them and pick out a half remembered one.

But the biggest new area is the section for open questions. Many of these existed in diary entries or in research notes attached to individuals. I’ve started pulling these out into more structured summaries of the research problems. Often when facing a tough problem I put it down for months or even years and having something to read when I pick it up again is very valuable. I started writing diary entries like this one that summarised where I had got to but I started forgetting when and if I had written a summary.

For example, this question about the parents of Alfred Rogers came about because I stumbled on a diary entry from 2024 that reminded me that we had done some interesting work and then parked it.

I’ve categorised open questions as brick walls where we have performed exhaustive searches, unresolved where we have parked a problem and puzzles that are questions that add to our knowledge but aren’t stopping us getting further. There is also a resolved category… for when we actually solve an open question!

I’ve also been doing lot more writing up of family history, as was my stated goal for this year. I finished the largest write-up of them all: a history of the Chambers family from Suffolk which runs to at least 55 printed pages. I’m currently working on a similar document for the Tew family and then I’ll move onto the Dineens and Hemmings who both have major brick walls in the early 19th century.

As a postscript I noticed that this site is now over 3GB in size! Obviously the majority of that is images stemming from my desire to have copies of the source documents readily inspectable.