Adding to the Family Records

So far there is one poor, overworked, fraught and hassled man putting records on-line. Me. It keeps me more than busy - it keeps me overworked.

I have several sheets of information to add to the records at the moment, and could pile up the dry, dusty numbers into the Family Records until I had a complete record of every single member of the Preston family we have ever found in all the records of England, Scotland and Wales - they sit upstairs in three very large boxes, meticulously typed on paper and carefully filed by parish, county and year by my astonishing father who spent many years compiling them.

Unfortunately, he never made much sense out of most of them - it was quite simply too much work for one lifetime. We do have sense in some parts of the records - mainly our own branch of the family - but for the most part they are just lists of details in each parish or village in Great Britain. It would take me months or years just to type them all in - and one day I do hope to have done them all.

But it will not get me the stories.

Finding the stories

As I said in the last Journal, the stories are even more important than the dusty old numbers and it is the stories that will be hardest to find. They are rarely written down - often they are deliberately "forgotten" by the family that was involved in them - and have to be dug out of what little written record there might be.

The stories, in short, are what the nearest relatives do best. And that means all of you.

So far, people have been wary of putting their details into the Family Records and - from what I have been told - it seems they have two main worries:

• They are not sure how a wiki works.
• They are not sure they want to record personal matters, family matters or those involved in them.

I suspect there's a third reason. I suspect people are a little afraid to try and tell a story about their own family in case it upsets others for some reason. And they could very possibly be quite right. It has to be a fine judgement that only you can make about how people in your family will feel. Let's try an example to show you what I mean.

Telling the tale

For this example we need to take an imaginary family. Of course, it will be an imaginary Preston family, since we all fall into that glorious category of being a part of the greater Preston brotherhood (and sisterhood). We're going to roll back the years a lot as well and presume that the family we are talking about is from a couple of Prestons - let's call them George and Mildred - who lived at the end of Queen Victoria's reign.

Now, our imaginary George and Mildred, as was the habit at the time, popped out a lot of kids. It may not be a Preston trait to have all that many children - and if anyone has even the faintest idea why that seems to be the case I would love to know - but this pair managed three boys and two girls. Let's call the boys Tom, Dick and Harry and the girls Mary and Anne.

As they grow up, eventually all come to that terrible time that was 1914. War breaks out and in due course conscription begins into the British Army. Imagine that Tom and Dick were eager to go and both volunteered, making their parents proud and giving the sisters something to gloat about to their friends. Harry, though, refuses to sign up. Indeed, when the time comes Harry even refuses to be conscripted and spends the war in prison as a conscientious objector.

The girls both use their female wiles and the reflected glory of their brothers to nab a couple of nice husbands and raise a family of their own - one, let us say, a naval family and the other remain as simple land-workers. Tom, unfortunately, is killed at the Somme and Dick is badly wounded, but does return home alive though severely disabled. He marries a nurse who looked after him in the hospital.

Back to the present

Their children, born at around the time my own father was, in the late twenties, early thirties, happily grow up and have their own children. It is those children - people like you and me - who are looking at this website and wondering if they should tell the tale of Grandfather Harry, or Great Uncle Harry and his refusal to serve in the Great War. It might - as it would be for me, for instance - be something of which they are very proud indeed.

But what about the rest of the family? What about the grandchildren of Mary and her naval officer? What about the grandchildren of poor disabled Dick who spent his years after the war in a wheelchair, coughing up his mustard-gassed lungs? How would they feel if someone should tell the story of Harry the Objector in a public space like this?

This - though it is only an example - is the sort of thing we need to be aware of. Don't tell potentially embarrassing stories without first asking those of the family you think could be affected. Get their opinion and, if possible, get them to read what you would like to say before you send it to the public record. It will not always work, but you should try.

Older records

There will be times though, and one of them has already arisen, when it is simply impossible to trace the family that closely and to ask them in advance. As I say, we already have one example of that in the Records.

Those of you who have looked at the Records should see that there is a story told about the old Preston family of Lancashire - at the time a part of my own branch of the family, but since that time a new branch of the family now to be found in Ireland - the Viscounts Gormanston and Barons Drumhaire. The story looks back eight hundred years to the terrible period of King Edward I and his less than glorious offspring. It tells how the records appear to show a story of corruption in high places - by other members of the family as well, I might add - and of betrayal, murder and possibly even treason by the family in the story.

Is anyone affected by it? Can anyone be offended?

Well, as part of the family branch involved, I suppose I could be but the most affected will be the current Viscount Gormanston and his family. As a member of the aristocracy, he is hardly someone you just phone up and say, "....listen, I want to tell the story about treason back at the start of your family line...". They would probably laugh at you, if they could even spare the time to listen to such a call!

Instead, it is fair to let them know after the story is told. Give them the chance to change it or to add to it. That is exactly the reason I have set the Family Records up the way I have done. As members of the site, you can and should feel perfectly free to read and change any parts of the record you have problems with. That is what makes a wiki work!

You should do the same. Tell your family stories, but remember that it is your family. Care for them. Let them know what you are doing. Tell them where to find the stories and how to change them if they want to. Involve them in the stories.

Our family stories may be part of the public history of Britain, but they are also personal. Never forget that your family - even if you have never met them - are still your family and the people most like yourself in the whole world.

We are - despite all our differences - one blood and one breed. Respect each other, but be open with each other. Let's hear what we have done across the world and across the centuries, but let's do it as friends.

As family.

Vibrant Life or Dusty Records?

For the past month or so, I have been involved in working out, digging through, compiling and sorting a very small set of dusty old records about the family of the Viscounts Gormanston, as those who have been reading the Journal will already know. Since posting the last two entries and trying to tell the story of one particular time in the early history of this one part of our old and widespread family, I hope I have helped readers to bring a little life to those dusty old records they collect and never know what to do with!

It also happens that - among other things - I teach courses in genealogy for adults in my local area. So this has been a great exercise to give to my poor students to help get the same point over to them that I have been trying to make here. But I find that both my students and the readers of the Journal have asked the same tired old question that always comes up when I do this sort of thing.

"Why," they ask, "go to so much effort when you already have the basic information?"

Information is nothing

Let's be straight, bold, up-front and honest about this: we are all of us involved in genealogy - the family history and ancestry of a group of people.

Notice that - we are involved in two things, not just one!

For many people that simply isn't true - they want to know who great-grandad was, but beyond his name and a few other details they don't care. They simply don't want to look into his life, don't want to know that he was bullied into joining the East Lancashire Regiment in 1914, when he was only 15; don't care that he was sent out to the front lines at Passchendale, don't care that he lived for four years in the stink and the blood and the mud and that he saw his friends, brothers and leaders shot down in gore and filth. They don't care if he was gassed in the trenches or that on one day at the end of the war he and all his friends in the regiment climbed out of the mud to attack the enemy only to see 40,000 of their troops be cut down around them.

Now - you tell me: what makes you who you are, your family what it is, your studies worth reading?

Is it the dry, dusty numbers like "Great-grandad, born, 1902, died, 1918" or is it the tale of his life, the horrors and joys he saw and the things he had to live with, to face and to overcome? I know what I think is important - and it certainly is not the numbers and the pedigree.

Landscapes, not maps

Every one of us had a father and a mother.

Every one of us was born - and so were our fathers and mothers.

Every one of us has a family ancestry reaching back beyond the very earliest records and into the dry savagery of pre-civilisation humankind.

We all come from the same few ancestors in Africa and far, far back we all come from the same few first human beings to walk the Earth.

Every one of us has that in common and no matter how much detail you can get to dress up your particular route from then to now, it is no more than just that: a route map to today. In truth, what matters is not the map of how you got here, it is the landscape through which you travelled. The personal history of each and every member of your family is far, far more important that the dry and dusty numbers of when they were born, when they married and when they died. Those numbers are just numbers - it is the story of their life which makes you who you are!

Often, people look at records perhaps a hundred years old and struggle to make sense of them. What I have done is show that with effort you can do it. You can make sense of your family records and for many of us those records will be far, far more complete for recent ancestors rather than those long gone in the past. But even when - as in the example I worked on - eight hundred years or more in the past then it is still possible to remember we are dealing with people, not with numbers.

Even from so long ago, we can put together what might have happened, and often can deduce what is the most likely to have happened.

Sometimes, you will not like what you find. There are skeletons in every family closet, and the further back in history your family goes, the more dust-covered, hidden, closets there are to examine. I was, for example, annoyed to find that my family had been supportive of Bloody-Handed Edward, the Hammer of the Scots - after all, a sizeable chunk of the Preston family are themselves Scottish!

Given that they did support him, I was more annoyed to find they probably supported his limp-wristed and useless son though I can't possibly say that I approve of them eventually betraying and attacking him, even if it was as part of the army of the Earl of Lancaster rather than a personal betrayal. I am certainly not happy that they could betray the Earl's own father to the King they would eventually betray.

The stuff of life

But this is the stuff of real life.

This is what made our family what it is.

This is what we are and where we come from.

Not the numbers. Not the "Ooh, look, we were related to an aristocrat" notions so common in amateur genealogists. The real meat, the real issue, the real history - the real GENEALOGY - of the family is in the stories. I've had a few people get in touch with me about the numbers and the details and ask me why I am making room in the records for stories about individual people. Now, you know why.

It is the stories that matter.

Historical Perspectives

Before dealing with Adam Preston and his son Roger, lets look at the times. In the time of Adam's grandfather Phillip, King Henry III ruled England after the death of his father King John (Lackland). John had been forced to sign Magna Carta and young Henry, only nine years old when his father died, spent his entire reign trying to get rid of it! In 1244, though, he took a break from dealing with baronial power when the Scots threatened to invade England.

Family records show Roger Preston was born at this time and that his father was one of the "Border Barons" whose lands were sometimes considered English and sometimes Scottish. At the time, Scotland claimed land as far south as the river Ribble in mid-Lancashire. Worse, an uppity baron called Simon de Montford was wandering around England stirring up rebellion against the King!

If that were not enough, Henry was at war in Sicilly and not on the best of terms with the Pope in Rome! Such an unpopular chap was not long for the world, even if he was Plantagenet King of England - and in 1262 he finally got Papal permission to raise armies and stomp Simon de Montford.

Unfortunately, he lost. At the Battle of Lewes he was captured, becoming a puppet figurehead; a King in name only.

New times, new kings

Luckily for the monarchy, which Simon all but abolished, young Prince Edward escaped with the help of Simon de Montford's cousin Roger (not Roger Preston - don't get confused). Both Edward and Roger Preston were about the same age - around 25 - when Edward led an army against his father's captors.

And unlike his father, Edward won decisively!

Edward continued to rule, rather than handing power back to his father, until Henry died in 1272, at which time he became the true monarch King Edward I (also known as Longshanks and "Hammer of the Scots").

What about the family?

At the start of this tale we have Phillip Preston, claiming lands in the North West of England... which happen to be claimed by the Kings of Scotland.

His protector, King Henry III is involved in diplomatic rows with the Pope, a war in Sicilly, a rebellion by Simon de Montford and a threatened full-scale invasion by the Scots! Even if he could have come to Phillip's aid, Henry was a poor military man and didn't have the support of his own barons.

He settled for telling the Earl of Lancaster that it was his job to keep the Scots away. So Phillip spent his life fighting against the Scottish virtually without aid.

Phillip did manage to father a son, Roger, though quite late in life. No doubt King Henry was grateful to the Border Barons for keeping the Scottish threat at bay, but I can't help feel he would have been especially pleased to have one of his Border Barons getting a son while Henry was celebrating the birth of his own son, Edward Longshanks.

Young Roger Preston was stuck with the same problems as his father, while Henry tried to raise armies, fortify York, keep the Scots from invading and put down the rebellion of Simon de Montford. It seems very unlikely Roger would have been able to avoid getting involved - it is what Border Barons were there for - so, like his father, young Roger would end up fighting for his King.

And so to Adam Preston

Like his father before him, late in life, Roger managed to father a son - our friend Adam Preston, who this discussion is about. After three generations of fighting the Scottish on behalf of both Henry III and, after 1276, his son King Edward I (Edward Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots) the family had spent an lot of money. Perhaps this helps explain the undoubtedly corrupt court ruling that helped Adam effectively steal the dowry of Margaret de Stainton's son John. Any grateful King would want the fortunes of so useful a House restored - otherwise they might not be able to fight those damned Scotsmen!

You see, Edward had - in the very same year - managed to get himself recognised as King of Scotland, and had placed John Bailliol on the throne as his administrator. It was supposed to be a "temporary arrangement" but Edward made it clear he regarded it as permanent and would do everything in his power to make sure he remained King of England and Scotland.

To help those not familiar with the history of the British Isles there's a simple way to imagine the situation. Many will have seen the not-very-good film "Braveheart" starring Mel Gibson - which happens to be unusually accurate for Gibson's historical films, tending as they do to have a lot more to do with how he wishes it had happened rather than what actually did happen. Well, all of this fun with Adam is happening at the start of the film - that is the historical context.

What happened next

Just after the end of the film, or at least the end of Mel Gibson (sorry - of William Wallace), old Edward Longshanks died, leaving his fourth son by Queen Eleanor to become the new King Edward II.

The new King didn't seem to care as much as his Dad about keeping the Scots away and for the next few years he let Robert the Bruce reconquer most of Scotland - though not the House Preston lands in Westmorland and Lancashire. The young King was too busy having a war of his own - against the very same barons his father had relied on to keep the Scots in check. It came about because soon after becoming King, he had left for France and put a baron named Galveston in charge of the country - who the Earl of Lancaster and his allies promptly deposed and executed.

Young Edward came charging back to England and set off to war against the barons, encouraged by Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke acting as royal advisor. The barons didn't care any more - Galveston was dead and that was what they wanted. Before a war could get properly under way, the barons gave in, asked the King's Pardon - and carried on as before.

Our own House was a vassal of the Earl of Lancaster. Rather than loyal as we had been to the King's father and grandfather, our House was one of the rebels. It got complicated now - often referred to as the "Rule of the Despensers", but we won't go into why - and many barons moved over from rebel to the King's side and even betrayed the Earl of Lancaster and had him beheaded in Edward's own Court.

Funnily enough, its at just this time Adam Preston's son Roger is made Justice of the King's Bench, which suggests Roger had curried favour with the King by helping to betray his own lord, the Earl of Lancaster.

Queen Isabella, the King's wife, was still in France, gathering an army under the command of Roger Mortimer. In September of the same year, 1326, they invaded England with a small army - but many nobles, including "Henry, Earl of Lancaster and his vassals" (British National Archives), betrayed the King and marched to join the invading army, stealing whatever royal treasure they could grab on the way.

Back to loyalty

Perhaps our House betrayed their Earl - it seems likely - but it is clear they betrayed King Edward II, though after his alleged murder (this is the infamous "hot irons up the bum" story of royal murder) they moved wholeheartedly to support the young Prince Edward in return for a promise to go to war against Scotland.

Just to show that honesty has its own rewards, the very year the young prince became King Edward III, he promoted Roger Preston to the highest independent court as a Justice of Common Pleas.

This is the story of Adam Preston and his family during a turbulent and vivid period of English (and Scottish) history. Stories like this - real people and their motives - are what family history is all about.

Genealogy Records

Thanks to the need for more details in the records section, I found myself needing to collect a set of genealogy for part of the family - I chose the Viscounts Gormanston and Barons Drumhaire - to use as an example for adding records. Like most in House Preston, that means dredging through centuries of history to find details, even though I desperately want them to be incomplete.

I don't intend to deal with work in the past fortnight to collect it: not yet. If it turns out people would like to know how I collected it I can, but only if people post questions to the Journal so I know what they are interested in. After all, I 've been collecting over eight hundred years worth of data! Instead, I'll look at what I found and how I recorded it - and apologise for forgetting to post the second September entry because I got too involved in research.

Finding historical records

Before I show off by saying how well I did finding old records, I'll be honest and admit a lot came from The Honorable Jenico Francis Tara Preston, 18th Viscount Gormanston and family during my last visit. I ought to have got back in touch to check and perhaps add more information, but its now some 20 years since we last met, at the Dublin Millenium Celebrations in 1988, and its more than possible he has died since. Should he still be kicking around, I'd be delighted if he got in touch - perhaps through the Journal - but won't pester a busy family with my attentions... even though I remember those wonderful dogs so well and would love to know if the family still keep wolfhounds.

That said, I did track down the earliest information myself and that's what I want to look at; not least because I'm still collecting and getting ready to store details on the Family Records. I really want to look at just the information for Roger Preston born sometime after 1290 AD and who died some time before 1377 AD, but it will be useful to mention Adam Preston, who died some time after 1290 AD.

The information about Adam comes from Court records of King Edward I. Before finding it, all we knew was his son was called Roger, as was his father. The sources provide a means to discover information not included in them - but implied - that may be useful to researchers into our rich and varied family history.

Adam Preston

His father, Roger Preston, doesn't have a recorded date of birth or death I've been able to find. Similarly, Adam doesn't have dates recorded. However, a stroke of luck turned up a manuscript from the British Library while compiling the records that can provide more detail than it actually gave.

In the year 1290, Adam Preston appeared before the Court of King's Pleas to seek release from betrothal to Margaret de Stainton, which was granted. There's little more in the manuscript, but it provides useful details.

First, Margaret was the widow of John de Stainton and as a widow, would have had to spend a year of mourning before the betrothal. It's unlikely that release would have been sought in the first year and, in addition, the court dealt with the care and wardship of Margaret's children by John - of which there were five. Now, it would be rare for a girl of 14 to marry and bear children but by age 16 is possible. It's unlikely a girl of means and position to have appeared before this Court, would remain unmarried at age 18 so we can presume she married John at roughly 16.

Similarly, we know biologically it is rare for a woman to have one child each year, though possible for there to be one every 18 months. While it would be rare for all children to have survived birth, we can't assume they didn't, so have the reasonable estimate she was married to John for about 8 years, making her age 24 by the time of John's death and 25 before a betrothal would be reasonable. Allowing a year of betrothal to pass before the case came to court, and under the assumption a man of means would not be engaged to a woman of means and station if she was much younger than him, we can say Adam Preston must have been 26 or older by 1290, making his date of birth some time around 1260 to 1265.

At some time after the case, Adam did have a child - his first and his heir - who he named Roger, after his father. It would be unusual for a man of position to immediately marry after a case such as this and most likely that there was a further betrothal for a year before marriage. Since we know it is rare- though not impossible - to survive beyond age 50 and have his first children, we can presume he was not older than 48 at the trial.

From this brief reference, we can say Adam Preston must have been born between 1242 and 1265, but more likely at the later end. We know his father was Roger Preston and grandfather Phillip Preston, who was born around 1220. Thanks to simple biology, we know that Roger must have been born no earlier than 1235 to 1240 and even that means Adam can't have been born until 1250 to 1260 - which fits perfectly with the information we have from the Court.

This means an initial guess at the genealogy which presumed an unknown generation before Roger is wrong, and he must have been the son of Phillip rather than grandson - there simply isn't time for the extra generation! From a tiny item, we can pin down the details of this early part of the family!

There are even two final brief parts of the records which cast further light on matters at the time - Adam was awarded "rights of wardship and marriage" for John de Stainton, meaning he had to look after him, so he must have been young in 1290, and Adam would collect the dowry for his marriage. We also know Margaret eventually provided land and rents for young John, rather than the normal case of this being provided from the dowry, so we can be sure Adam kept it. The family must have been relatively impoverished - or very mean - at the time.

Further details

With all this, I've not managed to get to Adam's son Roger, which is what I wanted, so I'll leave him for later and post another page. I'd like to deal with it here, but he was involved in too much politics - and the fact he was involved with King Edward III means the machinations of his father and sneaky keeping of the dowry for John de Stainton's wife made the family more wealthy and powerful by the time young Roger came along.

As a last note for anyone who still thinks this case was honest and completely above board, it is worth noting that the court was recorded and headed by someone whose name is given as Simon de Preston Atha. So if you don't smell a rat by now, there must be soemthing wrong with your nose!

Sharing Family Records

As mentioned earlier, the time has come where I hope you will be ready and able to add family records to the wiki section of the site. Naturally, as soon as I mentioned it I got questions from people who had read the Journal, checked the Family Records and found themselves confused!

There are times I despair of myself - because I haven't completed the "Help" section of Family Records to explain how to do it! I can - and to avoid my embarrassment will - use the excuse that I've been optimising the position in Google and other searches (we now turn up at about number six, I am pleased to say) and that it takes time and effort. The fact is, though, that I'd not looked at who is using the site or what they do.

How do I find out about visitors?

For most of the site, I set up analysis with the wonderful tools offered by our friends at Google. I make particular use of Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics kits. They let me give facts and figures about how many people, from where, use the website - even which bits they look at and when they look.

Over at Family Records, we have a wiki provided by someone else - by Wikispaces - since Google doesn't offer a wiki service. To be honest, if they did I would probably have chosen it to host records, but I'm glad that instead I looked around because I find Wikispaces a superb host that does pretty much what is needed - though there are a few ideas I could pass on to make life even easier!

One of the tools provided by the wiki services is an analytical set much the same as the Google toolkits. On the whole - though its a close-run thing - the Google tools are a little better, but both do the job. So with all these services available for the site, it is my own fault that I didn't actually bother to check them before asking people to start working on the site for the family.

So who uses the site?

If I had bothered to check, I would have found out what I need to know. Since this is supposed to be a family site for all the family, it makes sense to share the current status with you as well - so here we go.

Journal visitors currently come in at an average of:-

10 - 20 visitors per month
10 - 20 view older Journal entries
5 - 10 view Family Records pages
5 - 10 first read the House Preston page
75% of visitors are from the UK
25% of visitors are from the USA

House Preston visitors currently come in at an average of:-

10 - 15 visitors per month
5 - 10 view Journal pages
0 - 5 view Family Records page
75% of visitors are from the UK
25% of visitors are from the USA

Over at the Family Records, I can't track what sites readers came from, but we have a different story:-

300 - 350 visitors per month
45% of visitors are from the UK
55% of visitors are from the USA

Making sense of the statistics

I should have spotted that the records are used by a lot more people than anything else - and they don't get there from search engines or any other part of the site! What's more, they don't read any of the rest of the site in great numbers and its likely that the ones who do are the very same ones reading this page right now!

In short, the Family Records are driving the site, not the Journal or the House Preston pages - but I've been thinking it was the other way around!

Using the statistics

That means the records site needs to offer enough help and advice and not the journal pages - which is what I had been presuming. Like a fool, I offered a couple of pages and one family record as help - and now its clear I need to offer a lot more.

I need to show people how to add incomplete records so they can add information even with big gaps in the genealogy. Once that's done, I need to deal with storing records about Americans rather than British members. I even need to deal with so-called "slave names".

While writing this, I've been looking for a family to use as help. It isn't as easy as you might think, since it will be very much public and should only hold publicly available details. Given the large number of Americans, it would help if it was relevant to them rather than to English people. I say "English" because both Scottish and Irish may well have been involved in emigration to the USA over the years.

After much thought, I decided to store details of the Viscounts Gormanston and Barons Drumhaire since they are senior and very old members of Irish aristocracy and much of their genealogy is available publicly. It means our trans-Atlantic cousins may be able to look at it and say to themselves:

"Hey! That looks like it could be my great-great-great grandfather"...

...and find more of interest to them while I start to think about recording foreign members.

So, I will be very busy and may not even get around to posting this until later (and its already late in the month) if my editing and checking drags on and is messed up by collecting data on the Prestons of Ireland.

Over to You

The point has now been reached where we need to hope that you, dear reader, are about ready to contribute to the site. The point of all this work I've been doing is, after all, to encourage the House Preston families out there in the wide world to get together on-line so that we can all share our family information.

The site mash-up (as sites like this are delightfully called) was designed and put together from the very start in the hope that people out in the wider world would do more of the work than I will - and not least because once it is under way it should outlive any accidents that might befall me or any other regular contributor. It is built on my own pages, I actually own the pages that are linked into the site, and where payment is needed I make the payments - but under the skin this is all yours rather than mine.

Now the time has come for you to start using it more.

How you can contribute

At the moment, there are several ways you can, and I hope you will, contribute to the site. What I intend to do in this Journal entry is to encourage you to try one or more of those ways of sharing your own information with the rest of the Preston families all over the world.

Let me admit and agree right off, though, that there are several people who have contributed and who I hope will carry on doing so. Some of the ways that have been used are perhaps not as helpful as they might be since they come directly to me rather than to be shared with everyone else.

I do know that, in the UK at least, the way that the Guild of One Name Studies works is a little centralised and traditional. After all, my father did manage the One Name Study group for the Preston Family until his death - which is the reason I have such a vast quantity of paper records that I intend to transfer to the internet as this site builds up.

Unfortunately, tradition seems to be a major thing with the Guild and they still demand that name groups have one person, one postal address and paper records. A shame, in the modern world, and something that I simply don't have the time to deal with which is why I have created the site in the first place.

So that is the first way you can contribute - you can ask me questions. People have done it for a long while since I was always helping my father, especially in the later stages of his illness, to manage the One Name Study group but now I hope they will do it through the site rather than by direct postal or electronic mail.

Asking questions

It is simplicity itself to ask a question about the family: just look up to the top right of the page, where the site navigation is. Where you see the link "Contact the House" just point to it, click and it will use your own email software to let you write me an email.

Simple as that!

Comment on the Journal

For those who don't like to use email and perhaps don't even have an email address, the next obvious way to contribute is to send comments to the Journal itself as Purest Green (Sophia) did to a recent entry.

While the Journal is not intended to be any sort of general discussion group or forum for House Preston, this is the best way to deal with any general comments and points you might like to raise - such as Sophia's comments about the coat of arms shown at the top of this page and the arms shown in one of the Scottish castles associated with the family.

And this brings us to the next way you can contribute.

Pass on information

Using the same email link on the navigation section of the page, you can send me information you might have about the family - such as a description of all the different coats of arms used by the different branches of House Preston (of which there are at least five major ones).

Such contributions can include pictures that you want to see in the Journal though it is much better to use links to pictures that are stored off in the internet cloud somewhere since it will save space in the server we use for the Journal and let us put more into it later. You should make sure that such pictures are likely to stay where they are and - importantly - that you will be allowed to use them.

Don't just assume that the pictures can be used just because they are on the world wide web! That is not the way these things work: ask permission before you use something!

Link to the Journal

Very helpful to us are links to the site - any part of it, including the Journal. If you find something interesting anywhere on the site and you have your own web page, then please include a link to the page you found useful. Obviously, this will happen more and more as we add data to the Family Records, but please feel free to do it now to anything that catches your interest.

One of the easiest ways to add a link is to use the site button, like the one shown here, that you can find on the main page of the House site. It is a simple little picture with a built-in link and a snippet of web page code has been provided that you can just copy from the page and paste into your own page. Simple as that!

Follow the blogging

Finally - for now - you can add your name as one of those who follows this blog (the technical name for what the Journal is). This is the simplest of all the things you can do, since all you have to do is click the link over on the right of the page that says "Follow this blog" and follow the instructions on the screen.

Dead easy - and I hope to see you all adding yourselves to the list of followers over the next month while I go and visit your own pages out there in the internet cloud.

There are more ways you can and (I hope) will contribute to the site, but this has been a brief look at some of the simplest things you can do. So get working all of you! Let's make this site a truly useful resource for every Preston everywhere!

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.

First Family Page

I've been spending so much time working out how to record family details I've had very little for the Journal. In fact, I've spent more time making them easy to store and search than doing the records themselves! After a lot of work, I've sorted out a method and made notes to remind me while I got down to the hardest bit.

Slogging through the "Help Pages" of the wiki site I've been finding out how to easily manage space, create templates, use fancy editing features and all the bits of otherwise useless information to make life easier for once I have it all in place. It was almost a welcome break to settle down and link the different pages together so we have one single site for everything!

House Preston pages

As you can see from the picture at the top, the main page is updated and links to the various bitsin use all tied together in one place.... you know, when I started all this, I was sure it was going to be easier!

Anyway, its all done now and we can - I hope - start to see people using the set of sites to investigate the family and to record their own genealogy information for us all to see. There is to be some concern about putting details on-line, but I hope the Help Pages included in the records offer some fairly explicit advice.

I've had a couple of questions about the Creative Commons licence used for the pages - and some asking why I've not included it on all the pages. Since the second question is easiest, I start there and then explain the reason for the licence itself.

What it comes down to is simple - some sites, and Google, which runs these blog pages, is a particular example of it - have their own licence agreements written into the permissions to use the features they offer. These can and sometimes do mean that the Creative Commons can't be added to the site without permission and that is precisely why they currently don't have the licence added: I don't yet know if I am allowed to.

As to the licence itself, it is what is known as a "copyleft licence" (rather than a copyright licence). It works pretty much, but not quite, the same way as normal copyright, but means you don't need to get in touch with me to use bits unless you are intending to do what is not allowed - in the case of these sites, that means sell it, steal it or keep it private. Pretty much anything else goes.

Journal readers

Unfortunately, all this has meant that the journal readership has dropped like a stone! Over the last month, it hit the skids with very few visitors dropping by - and all of them from the UK, which is also a big change. We seem to have lost our Australian and New Zealand readers and since I asked them to get in touch there has been no response and no connection from our once regular reader from Alaska.

Of course, I blame myself, and will also blame myself if it doesn't improve, since I will be getting ready for the next year's courses over the next month as well. I will make every effort to get the August posting done and posted though knowing me I will either forget to do it or will write it and forget to post it - I do get forgetful at this time of year! It does, however, explain why very few bothered with the latest poll, so I will just remove it and leave the page as it is for now.

All I need now to make the last month complete is for someone to tell me the Alaskan reader is that idiot Sarah Palin and my misery will be complete.

Family Records

Yes, I admit it - hands up, give in and agree... the Family Records are not that big as yet. That's the point of only adding a link last posting - we have to start somewhere and this is it for the records. They are in a wiki space so you can add to them; how good they end up depends on you more than me!

I also admit its mean not to have given an email address to get in touch. Only people who had my address could send comments without them being on the journal. Rest assured, those who passed on my personal address will not get told off, but I've corrected that now so please use the new link in future.

For the moment, the posting link is a rather horrible "click me and I will use your own email software" link over to the right at the bottom of the other site links. I particularly hate links like that because I don't like to trust your PC any more than I trust mine and because I don't trust the good intentions of everyone who looks at the site. There are, after all, some not-very-nice-people out there on the internet. Unfortunately, that is what the blog host offers so - until I have a nice little email form set up somewhere else - I will have to make do with it, but rest assured that I will provide a nice little email form in due course!

Ok, personal sulk over, now to get on with the posting.

In the Journal

So far, most readers of this journal are in the UK with a scattering around the world - though I've still not heard from our Alaskan reader(s) if you're out there. I have, on the other hand, heard from a New Zealand reader whose visit did not show up in the Google logs when I last looked, so it was a double pleasure to hear from the antipodes!

For that visitor, the answer is that yes, we do know about Captain Preston and his less than entirely peaceful relationships with the Maori but there are other members of the House who know a great deal more about our Australian and New Zealand connections than I do. This is exactly what the Family Records section of the pages is for - you people out there in the Land of the Long White Cloud could and should know much more of our history in the Antipodes than I can possibly do from here in the UK. So get yourselves together, work out the family links and write up the history! Add it to the records on the website - that is precisely what it is for.

In the Family Records

For the Family Records, the story is very different from the Journal - two thirds of visitors are Australian and one third American, with us poor British members of the House hardly getting a look in at all. While the journal gets almost a hundred readers a month, the records only get around ten a month, so its possible those using the records already read the journal. This month I've put links in the journal to point at the records and in the records to point here, so hopefully both sets of readers will start using both sets of pages.

That link makes for a potential problem that I have heard about from users of the records: the pages are not yet complete enough for readers to know how to best use them. This seems to be as much a problem of readers wondering what the hell a "wiki" is and why I chose that for the records rather than a journal. Now, I really, really do not want to try giving a quick course in basic computer interactivity on the world wide web right here and now - and not only because if I did then it would be out of date in next to no time.

Instead, I will use the journal as a quick introduction to the records so that any new readers will know how to handle it. Existing readers who also read the journal might get a quick reminder of what can be done - I hope!

Family records pages

As mentioned, the records are in a wiki web site and offer things you don't get in a journal like this. For one thing, each and every page has a discussion you might want to join in with - and the whole point of those discussions is to talk about what is on that particular page. Each one also has a history to show you what changes were made to the page so that we can track down who it is that thinks uncle Jack never actually married auntie Vera (no, don't look for them - I made them up).

What seems not to have been spotted is that before you can even join in with a discussion you need to be what we refer to as a Talker - that is, you need to join the wiki provider. So far, I have had only one message from someone asking to be allowed to be a Talker, even though no such permission is needed. All you need to do is join Wikispaces by clicking the "Join" link at the top right of the Family Records page. Just to make life easier, you can also click the link I just wrote here as well - and that will let you join the discussions too.

Over the next month or so I should finish updating the example family record for the database which will mean my own little branch of the family, from my grandfather down to my children, will be made available and searchable in the records.

Not a lot, I know, but it should be enough to show you how the records work. Essentially, they are easy - write up everyone you can think of who was born in a particular century and link them together as the family. Send it to me to be checked and then I will approve you as a Writer for the records so that you can write your information onto a web page.

Its that simple. Once you are a Writer, you can add more and more records as you find them. That is the whole point of that section of the site - you, as the biggest part of the House, should be able to write the biggest part of the data. My job is really just to make it possible for readers to be able to find what you have written. Unfortunately, that does mean I may not write as much in the Journal next month, since I hope to be busy with the records and, to a lesser extent, with the main site that will link everything together.

Over-reaching Ambition

Last time I set this site up, I made mistakes; I wasn't ambitious enough. I thought a simple blog to help people make their own sites and blogswould be good enough. It wasn't, and I should have known it wouldn't be. This time, I hope to avoid that mistake and provide more for us all.

Back then, the main page was just for the regular and unchanging stuff. I thought people would link their own pages to the main site but they didn't - many couldn't do it because I hadn't provided features for it. In short, I was missing things people would need.

Don't get me wrong - I had planned to put them into the pages, I just never got round to it. I wanted everything perfect first time - which it never is - but this time I hope to avoid that mistake, start simple and add features as the pages grow.

What is different

The new site began with design - covered in Doing Design and Page Design Software. That meant the blog - where the design was made - came first. Everything else, though it is already under way, will be added later. Now I want to add the main core of the site: the home page site. This will arrive in a basic form and be added to as additional features come on-stream.

This time, I will not expect perfection right away, though the Family Records will also come on-stream at the same time. Incidentally, if any of you are already using the records, I would be fascinated to know why it is mostly people from Australia who are using it.

What comes next

The main page has several sections. In the middle is the main information, with a headline for the "big story" and two smaller ones with smaller stories. Each will - but not yet - link to a detailed page for each of the three main subjects. Below that is a section that can hold several other items if they are needed. All of this gives me a way to show what is going on at the moment.

On both the right and the left is a smaller column, like the one to the right of the blog page. Both are for additional items and are where you come in.

What can I do?

I have my own ideas for those two columns, but the point of a family site is that it should be for the family and not just me. Thanks to Google Analytics I know we get six to eight visitors each day so if everyone pops in twice a month almost a hundred people read each posting (Ed: Analytics puts the actual figure at 91). We have a fairly high readership and hopefully most are members of the broader House.

So I would be foolish not to ask what you want to see in those two columns. It may be a risk, since last time I ran a poll I got a very odd vote from one and mixed responses from the others, but I really have to ask, especially now we are moving up Google search rankings. If you think the poll doesn't offer enough choice, please send a comment - I'll read them all!

On the right is a short poll for your opinion what to put in those columns. Please take a few moments to cast your vote. Feel free to send a comment to explain, expand, instead of, or as well as your vote.

Last word

One final thing: it has me curious and really isn't something I can ask anywhere else.

In the wilds of Alaska we seem to have at least one reader. Now, I know the family sent quite a few to the colonies during the British Empire and there are lots of us all over the world, but so far I don't know of any out in Alaska. I would appreciate it if our Alaskan reader would send a comment or email to let me know about the family out there in the snows - and I am sure others would be interested too!

National Archives Update

I've been contacted by a nice person from the UK National Archives about changes - which may be welcome, since there are reports of problems using the site. The Archive is maintained on our behalf, with all we could need to know about our country, history and families - if you can find what you need!

As someone who is teaching genealogy to new enthusiasts, I am often asked about the Archives and see the shock and horror as users realise how difficult it is, so I am at the front of the queue admitting changes are overdue. Let's be honest; the Archive is huge and no matter how hard you try, huge amounts of information will always take a lot of organising and sorting if you want to find stuff.

Its hard to make something like the Archive easy to use and work done over the years is - for all its flaws - a magnificent effort on our behalf. I want to look at the site and show how you can use it - perhaps not easily - to find the sort of information that may be useful. The obvious place to begin, of course, is right where the links above take us: the main page.

Using the National Archive

Start at the top left. There is a "Family History" section with a nice little picture of a family group. A block below has a similar, but uniformed, group and deals with Military History, which is also useful for research.

Far too many spot the "Search" box and immediately try to find what they want - its like going to the reading room of the British Library and expecting the chap at the third desk from the right to pass you a copy of Radio Times from 1963 so you can check what time the first episode of Doctor Who started! Nice idea, maybe, but its never going to work.

Use the sections - click on "Getting Started" and it will help you use the site and find your way around. Sections advise on collecting information from home and family as well as features and data in the archives - and links to archived records.

Searching Archives

Most people make the error of immediately leaping into census records - understandable, but a mistake all the same. First find birth certificates, marriage details and death records of people you already know about. All those are offered by the archives and links in the introduction section. Note that these are often only indexes to details and full details are held outside the archive - but where that is the case, the index will tell you where the information is held.

Since people usually jump to the census records, that is what I will look at. One huge and obvious feature that leaps out is that the 1901 census is handled differently from the others. First, it can be searched by person, address, vessel (for mariners) or institution (for patients or prisoners, for instance). Other years are searched by country (excluding Scotland). For 1901, there is little more to say. Choose it and you can begin to search.

Shortly after that, you might notice that other years are offered by Ancestry.co.uk - and note it is the UK website, not the international one! Ancestry is a different issue altogether - the part of the site linked to is utterly useless and all it will do is try to get you to join at a cost of almost £100 a year! Ignore where the archive link takes you and click the banner on the Ancestry site to take you to their home page. From there, you can do a search.

At present, Ancestry is also updating the site - but unfortunately, as of the time of writing, the changes simply don't work. Their search does nothing. I will come back to this later and describe how to use it when it actually works! For the moment, take a short while and look at the National Archive - if you have any suggestions for their redesign, let me know and I will pass on your comments to the webmaster there.

Page Design Software

Last month, I looked at site design in House Preston: Doing Design but didn't mention what I would use to build pages and link sites together. Its about time I did, so I'll do that this month. All this was done some time ago - but the blog only went active in March. In fact, all this was done before Xmas 2007.

Design software

Its not some arcane mystery, if you stick to simple principles. Design is choices based on what you want. You can use a "Web 2.0" page like a blog or wiki - and I've done that. The host gives you design you can tweak, like the House Blogs. You just need time and inspiration.

The other choice is "static pages" that rarely, if ever, change. These are all over the web and can all be different if you like. For these, you do need design software to make each look just right.

Modular page design

What the simple choices miss is the idea of modular design, the most common going by the name MVC, or Model, View and Controller. It means everything comes in three parts: the way that it holds together, the way it looks and what it does. On the web, this is often overlooked.

The Model means the organisation of pages and the way they link: your site design. Software should keep track of pages and pictures to check none are "orphaned" or no longer used as well as any which are used but don't exist. Not long ago, when this was the deciding factor, there were three real choices: Dreamweaver, Frontpage or a few shareware applications that could do the same trick.

The View is the look and feel and could use things like the dreaded <font> tag or <table> tags to position bits of the page. If you are still using these, hang your head in shame - they destroy modular design!

Pages come to a browser as text converted into headings, paragraphs, coloured words etc. It works because buried in the browser is and always was a style sheet of instructions how to display tags. Someone thought it would be nice if users had style sheets to change what the browser did. If the user's doesn't have instructions for a tag, the browser goes down to its own instructions - cascades down the list of styles.

Several Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) tell the browser what a page should look like and are designed apart from putting pages together - they are truly modular. This was, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin for the awful Frontpage which Microsoft marched off into the sunset to be replaced by Expression Web but Dreamweaver marched into the future as the only sensible choice, though a few shareware and open source choices were catching up. In particular, one named NVU could manage - just about - the same tricks.

The Controller manages what the website does. Until recently, there were 4 main models for the Controller part of the design. Server-based software known as CGI or Common Gateway Interface can be called by the page and return information. Many pages use CGI, but years ago, Mozilla reasoned some could be software on the browser rather than the server. They added a feature known as Javascript which has become more or less universal. It was named to hitch a ride on the popularity of the use of applets written in Java - which is nothing whatever to do with Javascript. As usual, Microsoft had "philosophical objections" - sheer greed, the rest of us call it - and implemented their own version known as ActiveX objects.

Recently, a new technique has grown in popularity based on Asynchronous use of XML to pass data to a page, to be processed by Javascript. The initial letters give it its name, AJAX, which stands for Asynchronus Javascript and XML and it is the basis for "Web 2.0" pages. With older methods, it tends to be viewed as the be-all and end-all of the Controller, but nothing could be further from the truth!

Design Templates

Commentators forget it is design, not pages, that is modular. Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression Web and NVU all had page templates and still do. Often, they are treated as a pattern into which page content must somehow be squeezed. A good and effective use of templates has several elements which make the ideal design software and it is that I want to look at.

It allows - but does not insist on - the MVC model. It can use and edit Cascading Style Sheets for look and feel, link software for page functions and manage links and it carries the MVC model into every part of every page.

A good template tells you which bits can hold content and be edited. It tells you which bits can be repeated. It tells you which are optional. Finally, it tells you which are movable. Some may allow more, but these four are the main things a template should do. If we add those to our list of what a good web design tool must do, we come down to the same old faces - but which should you choose for your own use?

Software selection

There is no way to deny that up there in front is Dreamweaver, now owned by Adobe. It is without doubt the best in the field and should suit anyone with the need for design software and the money to pay for it. Unfortunately, it is a lot of money and for that reason I simply can't recommend it.

Thankfully, despite the odd protestation from Microsoft sales staff, Frontpage is now not merely dead, but rotted in the ground. If you already have it, bury it! If you don't have it then please God do not buy it!

The same can't be said for Expression Web and to be frank it is worth looking at if you are prepared to spend the kind of money Adobe ask for. For myself, I looked at the advertising page with a browser that was not by Microsoft - in my case I used Firefox - and you can see the results in the pictures here.

It took seconds to realise any product which produces this sort of Microsoft-dependent crap is not worth the money.

My advice? Don't touch Expression Web with someone else's bargepole!

Rapidly bringing up the rear comes NVU - which may or may not be as dead as a doornail! This is a totally unacceptable way to choose design software and for that reason alone NVU should be completely discounted from the running, but fortunately it carried on as an Open Source project based on the original NVU and developed from there.

The replacement is called KompoZer and is effectively the latest version of the old software with all its benefits and fewer of its bugs. Together with its unbeatable price - absolutely FREE - it makes KompoZer the natural choice for non-professional designers.

Best of all, you can simply download a copy and try it out. If you don't like it, you lose nothing and still have your hard-earned money to spend on one of the alternatives.