Spreading the News

For the last few weeks, here in the UK, there has been a strange annual event that takes place every year - teachers such as myself start to sit down and plan all the changes they will be putting into classes over the next year.

Its one of the odd things in life that people who don't work as teachers get the impression these changes and the planning that goes with them just sort of "happens" and really teachers sit around all day doing nothing until the students sit down in class.

Trust me - nothing could be further from the truth!

Teachers, as a rule, work harder outside the class than when they are in front of one. They most certainly work a great deal longer and many, many more hours tucked away in quiet corners than they do in front of the people they are actually teaching.

Here in the UK, the new academic year starts off in September, so the bulk of the work and planning for the whole year has to be done in August. Since that also tends to be the only time teachers can really take holidays and happens to be time I wanted to spend doing a lot of work on the family site, something obviously has to give.

So much to do, so little time

Among all the other pressures on my time, I have managed to complete the base design for a set of family records on the portion of the site that stores, searches and displays the family information. Granted, though - I have been working on that design for a good three months and doing the peculiar and, people have often told me, almost magical kind of maths that we database professionals do for a living. Yes, dear reader, its true - before I became a teacher I spent an entire career as a professional geek!

To keep things simple, I used my own little section of the family because it fits very nicely and very simply into a century group - organising families by century is the basic unit in the family records. It also happens to have very few complexities and generations to show thanks to some unfortunate problems that my ancestor, George Preston, had in his life. This meant that his only surviving child was my own ancestor, Roy Preston, and he only had three children - all sons - making the family tree for that century very simple indeed.

Building help files

I have used that century of information to put together the start of the family records and at the same time to put together a set of initial Help files to show how family records should be set up for recording in the family database.

There is obviously much more yet to do since this set of records should be as complete as they can be and so needs me to add a personal history - what each person did in their life and where they lived, worked and so on - so that the whole set can be properly linked. That, of course, is exactly what I have not been able to do thanks to the traditional "teacher rush" during August.

Plans and schemes

At this point, then, we have a simple set of files to help you build up your own family records. We have a simple set of family records for one family in the 20th century. We have an outline of how you should take care about personal data in the family records and avoid letting identity thieves make use of it. All of this is done - but there is much more to do next month and the month after.

To begin with, the time has clearly come for me to look around and find other groups and sites on the internet that are involved with the Preston family. I shall be doing that next month even if it means I can't do any other work on the site at all. It is, after all, one of the most important parts of this whole project.

I shall be making a special effort to contact the Preston families out there in Alaska that have had me puzzled for the past few months as well. Who knows, maybe I will actually find them.

There is also a group of us out in New Zealand - descended, I believe, from Captain James Preston - who I would like to get in touch with so I shall be looking for them too.

September, then, bids fair to be a very difficult and busy month but I shall try to get the Journal entries done as well and to keep you all in touch with what is going on - just so long as you all do your share and read the Journal! Yes, I noticed that you had stopped reading the pages: I regularly use a set of web tools to see who is reading the pages, where they are, how long they stay on the site, what they click, what they do, where they come from and where they go to after my page. It is tools like this that should help me make sure the site is doing the job it is intended for. I may even spend time - when I get time again - to write up details of the tools that I use so that you can use them for your own sites.

But that will be another story for another time.