Robin's Roots: Robin's Roots

Robin's Roots

Paternal: Richmond, Bacon, Trewhitt, Hutcheson, Kuykendall, more...
Maternal: Horton, Hazlet, McCutchan, Nelson, Arbuckle, Madison, more...

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Welcome to Robin's Roots - my family genealogy website

This is a dynamic database-driven site that pulls information directly from a database, and which generates pages "on the fly" as you request them. It uses a very powerful and adaptable commercial (but low-cost) family tree/genealogy web application called TNG, (see the page footer) that I began using in August, 2013, some 15 years after I posted my first family trees on the Web.

This site lets you search for and browse among over 11,000 relatives in my family tree, and to generate family charts showing the ancestors and/or descendants of anyone in the database. You don't have to be logged in to see most of my data. (At least for now) the only benefit of an account is that you can see living people, and that benefit is irrelevant if I don't have your immediate corner of the family in my database.

The "FAQ", "Content", and "Sources" tabs above describe the content and functionality of this site in some detail. For now, I'll just note that

The core of the application is the "Person Profile", which, on one web page, contains
1. All my data about a person,
2. Tabs and hyperlinks that generate charts showing the person's ancestors or descendants,
3. Hyperlinks to that person's parents, spouses, children, and siblings,
4. Hyperlinks to media items or albums tied to that person,
5. Popups that display mini-profiles when you hold your mouse over a link to another person,
6. A map showing where the person's life events occurred,
7. Notes, and
8. Source citations that describe where the person's data came from.
There are numerous ways to find people. The most fundamental ways are:
1. If you are closely related to me, or just want to start with some interesting profiles, you can use the "People to Start With" tab, which focuses on my ancestors.
2. At some point, you'll want to search for someone. On this page, you can find a search form to the right (or at the bottom, depending on your browser window size). On all other pages, a smaller search form can be pulled down from a menu item labeled "Search" the "Search" button near the upper-right corner of the page.
  Both search forms contain a link to the "Advanced Search" which, as you would expect from an "Advanced" search, lets you use many other data fields in your search.
3. On most of the genealogical charts that you can generate from the Person Profile, each person's name is a hyperlink to that person's person profile. On each chart's web page, the "Chart Types" link at the left of the horizontal menu through which you select a chart type explains differences among the various charts.
All pages that you can see on this site (other than this home page) use a standard layout whose navigation features are described in the Overview tab.

Just give it a try; you cannot accidentally update the site, and you probably can't crash it, so search and browse as you please. If you get lost, just click on Robin's Roots in the masthead on any page or the home link in the top navigational menu.

Finally - if you find typos, missing data that you can fill in, or data that you dispute, please feel free to use the Suggest tab or a "Contact Us" or "Contact Me" link to let me know about it.

Robin Richmond
Cleveland, Ohio
February, 2022

Some Places to Start Browsing the Family Tree

The search form to the right (or bottom) of this page or behind the Search drop-down link on all other pages,
The links at the top of this page, which are in the "Find", "Media", and "Info" drop-down menus on all other pages. These links go to pages from which you can link to relevant people. For example,
- A list of people by last name,
- A placename search,
- A similar Cemetery search, and
- Searches for media items (photos, documents, censuses, stories, etc.)
And perhaps especially the expandable lists below, in which
- Ttem numbers represent the number of generations above me, and
- The chart format displays more data than any of the other available format, but is pretty crowded. Still, on any profile or chart page, you can select other chart formats from the white-on-brown "Ancestors" and "Descendants"tabs.

My grandparents:
My grandparents:
1. Clarence Lester Richmond, Sr, a highly decorated WW1 Marine who kept a detailed diary on the field and wrote a fascinating and well-regarded war memoir. I had the distinct privilege of standing in places he wrote about and reading portions of his memoir to the other participants in two tours of WW1 battlefields, cemeteries, and monuments.
2. Edith Kuykendall Hutcheson, a kind and gentle woman who patiently played scrabble with me freqently duiring my adolescence, and who taught me to understand and appreciate elements of American history, especially the horrific Cherokee "Trail of Tears" that began, in a sense, in her back yard.
3. Brady Leslie Horton, a distinctly strong, gentle, unassuming, and hard-working man who left a wonderful legacy of kindness and helpfulness.
4. Ida Marie Hazlet, a remarkably clever and creative woman who, when 100 years old, could still hop down on the floor, reach under her bed, and pull out the Christmas card table-mats that were her final craft project.
Selected Profiles and Charts for my 215 direct Paternal Ancestors:
Profiles of 8 Notable Paternal Ancestors:
1. Judge Levi Trewhitt, a founder of Cleveland, Tennessee who was unjustly imprisoned (where he died) during the Civil War
2. Thomas Skillman was on the British fleet that took New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1665. Rather than return home, he established a large farm on Dutch Kill (a creek that still exists, though now industrialized) in what is now Queens, New York.
3. Rev. Joseph Hull W, a dynamic minister who ran afoul of church authorities in England and immigrated in 1635 with 20 families from his church, but still ran afoul of church authorities in Plymouth Colony, again in England, and again in Massachusetts Colony.
4. Rev. John Drake, who was born in New Hampshire in 1665, established the 1st Baptist Church of Piscataway, New Jersey in 1685, and served as minister there for 55 years
5. Nathaniel Fitzrandolph, who, in the early 1750s, raised the funds and donated the land for the college of New Jersey, which became Princeton University. He is interred in Princeton's Holder Hall FitzRandolph Gate W, which was built and named in his honor, is the most ornate of several gates in the 10'-high stone was around Princeton's campus, and is now part of traditions that span undergraduate students' time at Princeton:
  - At the beginning of each school year, all freshman parade into campus through Fitzrandoph Gate,
  - By tradition, undergraduates are not supposed to exit campus through the main gate, and
  - Immediately after each graduation ceremony, the class parades out of the gate to mark the successful completion of their matriculation.
6. Nathaniel's grandfather, Edward Fitzrandolph, known as a "Quaker Financeer", immigrated with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630 and helped establish Piscataway, New Jersey to escape religious persecution by the Puritans in Plymouth Colony. His future wife Elizabeth Blossom came to Plymouth Colony with her father in the same fleet. Nathaniel and Elizabeth are the 10th grandparents of Barak Obama
7. Elizabeth's father Thomas Blossom (born in 1580), was one of the original Pilgrims. Like many others, he lived for a time in Leiden, Netherlads, and set sail for America on the Pilgrims' first voyage in 1620 - but he didn't arrive in American until 1630. Until I learned about him, I didn't know that the Mayflower left England (twice) in company with the Speedwell W, which proved to be unseaworthy. Thomas Blossom had played a major role in the purchas and outfitting of the Speedwell, and wound up staying behind to sell it for scrap.
8. Francis Billingsley, who immigrated through Baltimore in 1649, was a planter who established significant land holdings in Maryland, and served as a constable in Calvert County, Maryland for 30 years.
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Ancestor Charts for 9 Paternal Ancestors:
1. Jacob Rogers Richmond My great grandfather: Richmond, Wattenbarger, Barger, Zetty...
2. Sarah Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bacon Jacob's wife, my great-grandmother: Bacon, Trewhitt, Keebler...
3. Leander Travis Hutcheson: Hutcheson, Billingsley, Skillman, Myers/Moyers, Snoddy...
  1. John Billingsley: Billingsley, Fitzrandolph...
  2. Christopher Skillman: Skillman, Hull, Fitzrandolph, Drake...
  3. Ruth Fitzrandolph: Fitzrandolph, Blossom, Dennis, Bloomfield, Mershon...
4. Olive Irene Kuykendall: Kuykendall, Matheney, Deatherage...
5. Jesse Young Kuykendall: Kuykendall, Westfall, Cool...
6. My great-great Kuykendall grandmother Mary Ann Matheny: Matheny, Deatherage, Wentworth, Routt...
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Descendant Charts for 19 Selected Paternal Ancestors:
1. My great-grandparents
  - Leander Travis Hutcheson & Olive Irene Kuyendall
  - Jacob Rogers Richmond & Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bacon
Immigrant or most remote ancestors - alphabetical
1. Jeremiah Bacon, my oldest known Bacon Ancestor, born about 1720 in Gloucester County, NJ (4 generations, 312 people)
2. Immigrant ancestors Francis (born 1620; 182 descendants in 9 generations) and William (born 1620; 175 descendants in 9 generations) Billingsley. Francis and William were brothers; both were born in Shropshire England. Francis' son John (who was born in the Netherlands in 1648) married his first cousin, William's daughter Sarah (who was born in Virginioa in 1652). Not surprisingly, most of descendants of Francis and of William who I know about are the descendants of John and Sarah.
3. Edward FitzRandolph, Immigrant Ancestor, born 1607 in Nottinghamshire, England
4. Charles Hutcheson, my oldest known Hutcheson ancestor, born about 1711 in Virginia or Ireland
5. Thomas Hull, Immigrant Ancestor, born 1547 in England
6. Jacob Keebler, Immigrant Ancestor, born 1710 in Deggendorf, Germany (Bavaria)
7. Jacob Luurszen (Later Kuykendall), Immigrant ancestor, born 1616 in the Netherlands
8. Daniel Mathena (Lather Matheny) Immigrant ancestor, born 1638 in Canterbury, England
9. Christopher Moyers (Later Myers), Immigrant ancestor, born about 1708 in Wuerttemberg (now part of Germany)
10. John Richmond, My oldest known Richmond ancestor, born about 1770 in - possibly - what is now West Virginia
11. Thomas Skillman, Immigrant ancestor, born in 1637 in Suffolk, England
12. Levi Trewhitt, My oldest and suspected Immigrant ancestor, born 1777; Maybe in Maryland, maybe in England
13. Jurian Westphal, Immigrant ancestor, born 1621 in Westphalia (now part of Germany)
14. Johann Adam Wuertemberger (Later Wattenbarger), Immigrant ancestor, born 1733 in Wuerttemberg (now part of Germany)
15. Jacob Johannes Zetty, Immigrant ancestor, born 1709 in the Palininate (now part of Germany)
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Selected Profiles and Charts from my 97 direct Maternal Ancestors:
Profiles of 11 Selected Maternal Ancestors:
1. Azre Horton, my oldest known Horton ancestor, whose origins are shrouded in mystery. He and six of his nine children migrated (not all together)from Mississippi or Alabama to Texas between 1870 and 1880. All of those children resided, at one point or another, in Quanah, Texas, where several Horton reunions, some with over 100 attendees, were held between 1976 and 2000. At the first of those reunions, my mother, a cousin of hers, and I wrote the names of 636 family members on a large paper tablecloth that I still have, and which sparked my first foray into computerized genealogy.
2. Jacob Friedrich Kummerlin, born in Wuerttemberg, (now part of Germany) in 1715, he immigrated to Philadelphia in 1750, spent some time in eastern Pennsylvania, then moved to the rough frontier in southwest Virginia. Very soon after moving to Virginia, he was killed while a captive in a skirmish between Native Americans and the Virginia Militia in 1763, and buried at that spot, in an island at the confluence of Turkey Creek and the New River.
  His son, Joh (also born in Germany) settled in Mason County, West Virgina after traveling by raft down the New River and Kanawah River to within a few miles of the Ohio River.
3. William Arbuckle. As a "volunteer soldier" (his words) in the Virginia militia, He was stationed at Point Pleasant, Virginia (now West Virginia) during the historically significant Battle of Point Pleasant W in 1774 and (perhaps) during the early years of the American Revolution. In historical records, William Arbuckle is often confused with his much more prominent older brother , Captain Matthew Arbuckle W who was a renowned frontiersman and soldier, and was the commandant at Fort Randolph (at Point Pleasant) when the Shawnee chief Cornstalk W was infamously murdered. Capt. Matthew Arbuckle was the father of General Matthew Arbuckle Jr W, after whom Oklahoma's Arbuckle Mountains are named.
  William Arbuckle was the third husband of...
4. Catherine Madison, who was 20 years old and pregnant with her second son when, her first husband, Captian Robert McClanahan, Jr, was killed in the Battle of Point Pleasant, where her uncle, Captain John Dickinson was wounded. Then, when she was 23, her second husband and their one-year-old son both died. She married again when she was 25, and had eight more children with her third husband, William Arbuckle
  When Catherine was only two, her father,
  1. Humphrey Madison, an ensign in the Virginia Militia (probably under the command of his brother-in-law uncle, John Dickenson) was killed in an Indian raid at about the same time two of Catherine's half-brothers were captured. Humphrey appears to have been a second cousin once removed of President James Madison. Their immigrant ancestor was
    1. Isaac Maddison, born in London, in 1590, and a very early settler of Virginia. He died there in 1624.
  Catherine mother also lost two husbands
  1. Mary Dickinson's, first husband, Samuel Brown, died of illness, leaving her with three sons. Her second husband, Humphrey Madison, was killed in an Indian raid only a few days before two of her sons were kidnapped in another. One escaped (though history does not tell us how or when), and the other, Adam Brown, was traded to the Wyandotte Nation in Michigan. Adam married a Wyandotte woman, served as a community leader, and ultimately served as a negotiator for Native Americans in Canada in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Throughout his adult life, Adam was known both by his Wyandotte name and his English name, but never returned to Virginia.
    Mary's father,
    1. Adam Dickinson, was the the first of his family to leave the comforts of New England. He arrived in frontier Virginia settling on the Virginia frontier in about 1840, and was soon established as a county justice and promient landowner. Two of Adam's brothers were prominent theologians whose published sermons and essays are still available online:
      
      Jonathan Dickinson Jonathan Dickinson W was the first president of (what became) Princeton University, and
      
      Moses Dickinson served as the minister of the church in Norwalk, Connecticut for 51 years.
      
      Their immigrant grandfather,
      
      Nathaniel Dickinson W, born in 1601 in Linconshire England, and immigrated to Weathersfield, Connecticut in about 1637. He was a public official, a founder of Wethersfield, Connecticut. Several of his sons served in King Philip's War W, where three were killed.
      
      Two of their maternal great-grandfathers were also notable early immigrants:
      
      Moses Wheeler. Born in Middlesex, England in 1598, Moses emigrated to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1638. He was banished from New Haven for kissing his wife when he returned from a trip on a Sunday, and settled in Stratford, Connecticut, where he ran a ferry and operated an inn. He died at age 100.
      The I-95 bridge over the Housatonic River between Stratford and Milford, where Moses ran his ferry, is named the Moses Wheeler Bridge W.
      
      Adam Blakeman W Like Moses Wheeler, he was born in 1598 and migrated to Connecticut in 1638. He was the renowned and respected pastor of the Anglican church in Stratford, in the days when the pastor of the church was also essentially the executive officer of the town.
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Ancestor Charts for 5 Selected Maternal Ancestors:
1. My grandfather, Brady Leslie Horton: 11 people in 4 generations, all Horton, Todd, Ross
2. My grandmother, Ida Marie Hazlet (27 people in 6 generations): All Hazlet, Graham, McCutchan, Nelson, into Nelson, Arbuckle, Madison.
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Descendant Charts for 8 Selected Maternal Ancestors:
1. James Hazlet, born in Pennsylvania in 1787
2. Richard Nelson born in Maryland, probably about 1750
3. William McCutcheon (later McCutchan), born in Augusta Co, Virginia in 1739
4. James Arbuckle, born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, in 1713
5. Edmond Fish, born in Maryland in 1670
6. Isaac Maddison (later Madison), born in London, England, in 1590, and the great, great, great grandfather of President James Madison.
7. Fridrich Jacob Kummerlin (later Kimberling), born in 1715 in Wuerttemberg (now part of Germany)
8. Nathaniel Dickinson, born in 1601 in England, ancestor of numerous prominent Dickensons
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Or, you can get good overviews of some of the families in my database by viewing some very old and out-of-date "Horizontal Family Trees" that pre-date my online database.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do I find the person I want to see?

On the home page, you'll find

A basic people search. The search results consists of a list of people; you then select one to see that person's profile (see more about the Person Profile below)
In the search box, hyperlinks to:
1. The Advanced People Search, which lets you specify many search constraints,
2. The Family Search, which asks you to specify (parts of) a husband's and/or wife's name, and
3. A Site Search which is a search for text anywhere on the site. If you enter a name here, the search could return dozens of matches, including all kinds of ancestry charts in which that name occurs.
A link to my tab, which has numerous links to significant people in my database.

On essentially all other pages (like this one)

The link in the horizontal menu near the top of the page pulls down a search box that does essentially the same thing as the search box on the home page,
The drop-down menu contains links that find people by browsing lists of first names, last names, and the like.

On the Person Profile, and in ancestral charts, each family member's name is a link to that person's Person Profile.

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2. What is the "Person Profile"?

The Person Profile is, in essense, the core of this web site. For each person in the database, the Person Profile shows essentially all data I have for that person, including:

Personal facts (e.g. name, birthdata, birthplace, deathdate, deathplace)
Parents and their marriage.
Marriages, spouses, and children.
Other Personal Events such as Residence, Military Service, Occupation, Property Transactions, "Arrival" (genearally meaning "Immigration")
Media Items, which may be photos, document images, census images, histories (stories), etc.
An "Event Map", showing where significant events in the person's life occurred.
Source Citations

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3. How do I find a person's ancestors?

When you are on a Person Profile (such as my grandfather's), just click on the

tab to see a configurable ancestry chart.

The application can generate several types of Ancestor charts. (See descriptions of all of them.) The chart types are listed in a horizontal menu below Ancestors tab:

Some of these charts, like the Standard chart, (shown here) and its "Box" and "Compact" variants, are graphical, with lines connecting a little boxes of data for each person. These charts are quite attractive, but frequently hard to print because the spacing between those boxes causes them to be awfully wide.

Text-based charts, such as the "TextPlus" Descendant Chart (see an excerpt) are much more compact, allowing you to see more information on the screen without scrolling, and requiring less paper to print.

The TextPlus chart is the default Ancestor chart; it is displayed automatically when you click on the Ancestors tab. It is, by far, the most flexible and dynamic of the Ancestor charts, and can display more data elements than any of the others. You can learn more about formatting the TextPlus chart through help buttons on the TextPlus chart's web page.

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4. What if I want to see an individual's descendants?

On Person Profile pages, the Descendants

tab is used to show a Descendant chart:

As with the Ancestor Charts, there are graphical and text-based charts (see their descriptions), and "TextPlus" charts are the most flexible and data-rich of the charttypes. (See a TextPlus descendant chart.)

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5. Is there a way to tell how two people in the database are related?

Yes, there is. The Relationship tab on a Person Profile page will identify the relationship between two people, and will illustrate that relationship by showing everyone on the path between the two people.

You may need to use the Find button to locate the second person in the comparison. But if you are logged into the site and your account is tied to a Person Profile, then the Relationship page may default to your genealogy page.

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6. If I see a mistake in the data on the website can I correct it?

Only indirectly. The Suggest

tab allows you to send corrections, updates, comments or any other information to me. I'll have to enter that information in Ancestry.com, where I do all of my data entry. (That's a whole other story.) Then I'll

Sync my Ancestry.com tree with a program called Family Tree Maker on my PC.
Export my data from Family Tree Maker,
Import the entire tree into Robin's Roots

I used to go through that process almost weekly, but, these days, I'm lucky to do it once a month. So don't expect quick turnaround, unless you write a specific note about timing on the suggestion form.

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7. Is there a way to print a page without all the headers and icons?

You bet. Whether you are looking at a person's detail page or a family tree chart, just click on the Print

button located near the upper right the page. (Not your browser's print button - yet.) This Print button doesn't actually Print...it pops up a new "printer-friendly" window without the extraneous graphics and links. You can then hit control-p or your browser's Print button, or do whatever you ordinarily do to print.

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8. What kind of data do you keep track of, separately from its use within a Person Profile

Gobs and gobs! You can search for, and produce reports about

Places - One common table of Place names is used for birth places, death places, burial places, and all other event places.
It is probably important to mention here that, unlike some genealogy software, TNG does not use a "Place Authority". That is, it does not have or consult a list of virtually all known placenames (whether in the USA, or even in the world). Given the price of a subscription to TNG, a built-in subscription to one of the existing Place Authorities would just be too expensive.

Actually, since TNG supports customizations (called "mods"), someone could write a mod that implements a Place Authority. Such a mod would probably require each website that uses that mod to pay a subscription fee. It just hasn't been done yet.
Cemeteries
Media Items, which may be photos, document images, census images, histories (stories), etc.
Albums
Source Citations
DNA Tests

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9. What's a second or third cousin (etc.)?

Cousin designations get funny, because there are two conflicting definitions. Well, we all know what first cousins are - the children of siblings. They have a common grandparent. But there are different 'social' and 'genealogical' definitions of higher-ordered cousins:

'Social': The scheme that I learned growing up, and that the non-genealogists I have talked with follow, just expresses a "degree" of the relationship; i.e. 1st cousins, 2nd cousins, etc. It never uses the term "removed".
- My second cousins are the children of my first cousins,
- The children of my second cousins are my third cousins, as are my parent's first cousins, and so on.
To calculate the degree of the relationship:
1. Start with the common ancestor, and move two generations down to find 1st cousins.
2. Go down the family tree on the first person's side, adding 1 to the degree, until you get to the first person.
3. Then go back to the first cousins, and go down the second's persons side of the tree, adding 1 to the degree, until you reach the second person.
Note that this relationship is reciprocal - I am the 2nd cousin of my 2nd cousins, and so on.
'Genealogical': To a genealogist, nth cousins (without the term "removed") are always in the same generation, and the "removed" part of the expression refers to the number of generations that separate the two people.

My 1st cousins are, of course, the grandchildren of my grandparents, and their children are my 1st cousins once removed.
My 2nd cousins are great-grandchildren of my great-grandparents. Their children - and their parents - are 2nd cousins once removed.
My 3rd cousins are great-great grandchildren of my great-great grandparent. Their childen - and their parents - are my 3rd cousins once removed, and so on.

The "degree" of the relationship:
1. Find the two people's common ancestor, and go down two generations to find first cousins.
2. Go down both sides of the tree together, incrementing the degree by one for each generation, until you find the first person in the relationship. (Note that you may pass the second person on your way down the tree.)
The 'removed' part
1. Start with zero at the relationship you stopped at for the "degree" of the relationship.
2. Walk up or down the tree, as appropriate, incrementing by one for each generation until you reach the second person.

when you start talking about 2nd and 3rd cousins (and so on), it is critical to be aware of which scheme you are using

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(Note: much of this FAQ was copied from the Winslow Tree FAQ.)

Statistical and Descriptive Overviews

First - this website is driven by a database application called TNG (for The Next Generation of Genealogy Software"). Some of the terminology I'll use is specific to TNG, and some is general genealogy jargon, so some terms I use may not have the exact meaning you'd expect in general English conversation.

Who is in my database

Gen	Count	Early	Late
-4	1	2014	2014
-3	38	1977	2014
-2	347	1956	2020
-1	1032	1913	2015
0	1403	1888	1987
1	1815	1866	1964
2	1752	1808	1959
3	1604	1790	1948
4	941	1786	1931
5	583	1758	1859
6	359	1728	1858
7	274	1699	1880
8	161	1665	1752
9	192	1643	1717
10	125	1593	1681
11	77	1584	1670
12	27	1547	1621
13	2	1595	1598
	10733	1547	2019

A statistics page provides several tabular and graphical overview of my data, broken out by place, family names, and century.

The snapshot to the right shows the range of birth dates for each generation of family members. (I'm in generation 0.) The most recent birth is of a great niece, two generations below me. The births in lower-numbered generations are from remote corners of the family.

Other statistics:

I have over 260 known direct ancestors.
200 of them are immigrants (not counting those who immigrated with their parents).
That number of immigants is surprising given that I have ancestral lines going back to Plymouth Colony (see Plymouth County and Barnstable Colony, Jamestown, and New Netherlands before 1650. My most recent immigrant ancestor was a great, great grandmother, Margaret Graham, who arrived from Ireland with her parents in about 1845.

Number of descendants in some of my ancestral lines:

Me:	Richmond - 1472 people in 10 generations. I only have meaningful information back to my great-great grandfather William Rogers Richmond and his brother Samuel David. I have good evidence that their father's and/or grandfather's name was John, and that he was born around 1770, but I don't know who their mother was, or where they all came from, beyond "somewhere in Virginia". Curiously, Samuel and his progeny were much more prolific than William and his family. Back when I thought that I had captured every single one of William's descendants through about 2000, there were only about 150, whereas, without trying to capture everyone, I had over 1100 of Samuel's descendants.
M:	Horton - 1148 people in 8 generation. Horton was my mother's maiden name. I only have information back to my great, great grandfather Azre Horton, and I don't know when and where he was born. Shoot, I'm not even completely sure of his first name. A Horton family reunion in 1976 is where my interest in family history started. My mother and I talked to the patriarchs and matriarchs at that event, and sketched family trees on a big white-paper tablecloth. At the end of the day, my mother saved it, then gave it to me and said, "Do something with this." So I entered the into a mainframe computer data file and launched my computer-based genealogy hobby, too. There were 636 names on that tablecloth - and I still have it.
FM:	Hutcheson 1341 people in 11 generations My paternal grandmother's paternal line goes back to my 5*great grandfather Charles Hutcheson, Sr. A good bit of this data came from my grandmother and other Hutcheson relatives with whom I corresponded back in the 1980's.
MM:	Hazlet 331 people in 8 generations. My maternal grandmother's paternal line goes back to my 3*great grandfather James Hazlet. I can't really explain why I have relatively few Hazlets, compared to Hortons and Hutchesons, other than that I know fewer Hazlets personally, and none of my Hazlet cousins captured their branches of the family for me.
FFM:	Bacon 1313 people in 10 generations. My father's paternal grandmother's was Sarah Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bacon, and my Bacon line goes back to my great*5 grandfather Jeremiah.
FMM:	Kuykendall 1846 people in 14 generations. My great-grandmother's Kuykendall line goes back to my 8xgreat grandfather, immigrant Jacob Luurszen. The Dutch did not used surnames in the 17th century. "Luursen" is a patronym that means "son of Luur". (Jacob's son Luur, was simply Luur Jacobsen). When the British took over New Netherlands and required the Dutch immigrants to choose surnames, Luur Jacobsen chose "van Kuykendall". The surname prefix "van" was dropped within the next couple of generations.
MMM:	McCutchan 521 people in 10 generations. My McCutchan line goes back to my great*5 grandfather William McCutcheon, who was probably the son of one of five immigrand McCutcheon brothers, but researchers just haven't decided which one was his father.
FFFM:	Wattenbarger 690 people in 11 generations. My great*5 grandfather Johann Adam Wuertemberger immigrated to Pennsylvania from Wuertemberg (now part of Germany) in 1751. His grandson John Adam took on the name Wattenbarger
FFMM:	Trewhitt 705 people in 9 generations. This one is a bit of a problem. The Trewhitt ancestry beyond my great*3 grandfather, Judge Levi Trewhitt is not documented, but there sure are a lot of people out there who have identified ancestors without documentation. I've tentatively taken the Trewhitt line back to a purported father of Judge Trewhitt, immigrant Levi Trewhitt, Jr, from England.
FMFM:	Billingsley 1164 people in 17 generations. At least 4 sons of my great*11 grandfather John Billingsley immigrated to America. Some reports say that John also came to America and returned to England. In any case, two of John's sons, Francis and William, are my direct ancestors, because Francis's son William marriaged Williams's daughter Sarah.
FMMM:	Myers 995 people in 13 generations My 6th great grandfather George Moyers immigrated from Germany in 1717. The name Moyers persisted for at least 5 generations, but it was Myers by the time my 3rd great grandparents Narcissa Ann Myers and Flavius Josephus Hutcheson married in 1852.
MMMM:	Nelson 553 people in 10 generations. As with many, if not most of the progenitors of my ancestral lines, almost nothing about my 5th great grandfather Richard Nelson is known other than his name. My grandmother was sure that we were descended from Admiral Horatio Nelson but I can say with confidence that we are not.

Remember that there is a great deal of overlap among the families above. For example, the Hutcheson (1341) and Myers (995) families share the 835 descendants (including spouses) of Flavius Joephus Hutcheson and Narcissa Ann Myers.

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People, Places, Families, and other stuff

People - People and their "Person Profiles" are, in a very practical sense, the core of the application. There is a Person Profile for each of the roughly 11,000 people in my database. The Person Profiles tell you pretty much everything I know about that person, and provide links to parents, siblings, and children, and to various types of dynamic genealogical charts that illustrate or describe the person's extended family.
Families - In TNG, a "family" is a nuclear family (a couple and their children), not extended families.
Events - The things that happen to or describe a person or family are "events", which can all occur multiple times for a person. For example:
- Even when people live in the same place their entire lives, "Residence" events occur when something (such as a census or a city directory) documents where that person lived.
- Each person is born just once, but there can be multiple birth events resulting from different opinions about when that person was born.
- Education events describe when and where a person went to school.
- Even "Occupation" is an event, since
  1. A person can have different occupations at different times, and
  2. One occupation can be documented (e.g. in cesnsuses, etc.) more than once.
- Note that since genealogical databases consider a person's life span, and don't focus on one point in time, "Age" is not an event, or really, a data value at all. "Age" is just something that is calculated based on a person's date of birth (well, or "most likely" date of birth) and the date of an event, or maybe the current date.
Places both are and are not the same thing as "places" in the real world. "Miami, Florida" is a place in the real world, but in a genealogical application like Robin's Roots, placenames are expressed more formally, with a city/county/state/country structure such as "Miami, Dade County, Florida, USA". And places really only exist in genealogy databases if an event has happened at that place. Thus, in my database, "Calcutta, India" just doesn't exist. On the other hand, with about 4500 places in my database, most recognizable city names in the USA are present, though a whole lot of towns and counties are not.
By the way, Robin's Roots is very USA-centric. It just turns out that essentially all of my ancestral lines go back a long way in America - some to Plymouth Colony, Jamestown, and New Netherlands, all before 1650. Consequently, you'll sometimes see placenames expressed with abbreviations familiar to Americans, such as "Cleveland, Bradley, TN" rather than "Cleveland, Bradley County, Tennessee, USA". But TNG cannot really deal with abbreviated placenames everywhere, so in some pages on this site,such as the Places search page, you'll see placenames expressed in the longer format.
Media items, Sources, Citations, Repositories, Cemeteries and others are described elsehwere in my documentation.

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Types of Pages - Charts, Reports, Searches, etc.

This section breaks out categories of web pages on the site in a pretty arbitrary way. It doesn't paint the whole picture, but it covers most pages:

The Home Page - the one you are on. It is distinct both in its layout and in its tabs. (Not that other pages don't have tabs; they just don't have these tabs.)
- A 'Welcome' tab,
- A tab ("People to start with") that provides navigation to significant people in the database, and
- Four tabs (including the one you are reading) that describe the site and its data.
All other pages on the site share a template-driven layout that is described in below, in the section titled "Page Layout & Navigational Menus".
- Search Pages that are used to find various "objects" in the database such as people, families, sources, media items, places, and so on. Links to the search pages are at the top of the home page. On all other pages, they are in three drop-down menus (Find, Media, Info). (The main menu bar and its drop-down menus are illustrated below, in the section "Page Layout & Navigational Menus".
  Most of the search forms have options that affect which records are included in the search results, and that affect which fields are displayed in the search results. Search results are typically shown on the same page as the search form and are represented as a table, where rows represent records, and columns represent data fields.
- Profiles describe objects (people, families, places, media items, etc.) in some detail. They are usually displayed through searches, but, for example, little spyglass links next to placenames in Person Profile (and elsewhere) link to the Place Profile page.
  By the way, none of the "Profile" pages are labeled as such, they just have headings that identify the specific object they are profiling.
- Reports are similar to Search Pages, except that they are based on custom queries that have been defined and saved by an analyst or programmer, and typically don't have run-time options.
- Charts are - in most cases - representations of the ancestors or descendants of a particular person. Charts are accessible through navigation tabs labeled "Ancestors", "Descendants", and "Relationships" in the Person Profile.
  TNG Charts are "dynamic" in the senses that they are created as a user requests them, and that, in most cases, they can by adjusted by the user. For instance, in Ancestor and Descendant charts, the user can select how many generation are to be included in the chart.
  
  There are several types of ancestor charts and several types of descendant charts.
  Charts vary in the way they organize data and in how much detail (especially dates and places of birth and death) they display. Some charts are graphical; others are presented as text. The graphical charts are "prettier", but the so-called "TextPlus" charts contain the most data, and, in particular, are narrow enough (even with well over a dozen generations) that they fit within the width of one printed page, albeit they can sometimes require landscape orientation on legal-length paper.
- The Media Page - a single page which, not surprisingly, displays a media items. Media items are attached to people, families, places, or cemeteries, or are sometimes grouped in albums that are attached to people or families. Media items are categorized into "Collections" (also sometimes confusingly called "media types"):
  - Photos (of people and families), most of which are .jpg images.
  - Documents (that is legal and civic documents), which can be scanned .jpg images, pdf documents, HTML representation of documents, etc.)
  - Histories (stories, genealogies, many book excerpts, etc.), which, like Documents, can be scanned .jpg images, pdf documents, HTML representation of documents, etc.)
  - Censuses (census worksheet images). These could be considered "Documents", but are broken out in a separate collection because I have so many of them.

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Page Layout and Navigational Menus

Essentially all pages on this site - - other than the home page (which you are reading now) - use a template that provides a consistent layout of content and navigational menus.

The "Person Profile" is perhaps the best example of a templated page. (The Welcome tab here on the home page tells you about the Person Profile, and how to find people.)

To see both this documentation and a simple Person Profile on the screen at the same time,

Make sure that your web browser is not filling the entire screen.
(If it is, you can click on the square "resize" icon, which, on Windows PCs, is between the "minimize" (a dash) and "close" (an X) icons at the upper right.)
Hit shift-click on this link to a Person Profile
(FWIW, a shift-click will act this way on almost any link on almost any web page in the world)

On template-driven pages such as the Person Profile, look for these menus and links near the top of the page:

The top horizontal menu
1. A link to the home page,
2. A slide-down People Search form,
3. A login (or logout) link,
4. Three drop-down menus (Find, Media, Info), with 8-10 links each, including
  - Lists of names (as illustrated in this screen clip),
  - Searches for just about everything in the application, such as People, Families, Places, Cemeteries, Photos, Histories, Documents, and Photo Albums (etc.)
  - Anniversaries and Events occurring on a given date
  - A statistics page that presents several overviews of the data.
  - and so on.
5. A drop-down menu that allows users to select the language for the text - not the data - on many pages. (Not that I have many international visitors, but it's a handy feature on many sites.)
A "Print" button near the upper right, which doesn't actually print the page, but rather very helpfully displays the data in a more printer-friendly way - without the graphical header, the navigation menus, and the footer.

On most pages, you'll find additional navigation components just below the menus show above. For example, on the Person Profile and related pages, you can see these menus that focus the person being profiled:

The mostly white-on-brown tab menu just below the person's name, where you can (among other things):
- View Ancestor & Descendant Charts that link to additional members of the family. (Look for the "Print" button near the upper right of the page before actually printing a chart. The "Print" button makes sure that the chart is formatted for printing rather than for viewing on a screen.)
- View the relationship between the person you are looking at and any other accessible person (possibly including yourself, if you have an account and are logged in).
- Submit a Photo or Document associated with that person, or
- Suggest a change to that person's data (or anything else, for that matter).
The white-on-slate-blue links just below the tab menu, where you'll find options for the current page.
For instance, on the Person Profile, you can use those links to limit the Person Profile to
- Just the personal information including parents and spouses and children
- Media - that is,
  - Photos,
  - Scanned and photographed documents (death certificates, county birth & death indexes, marriage certificates, etc.),
  - "Histories" (short biographies, family histories, and anecdotes),
  - Gravestone Photos, and
  - Scanned census worksheets.
- Sources & Citation, where you can see where my data came from, or
- The Event Map, which shows you a map that identifies where that person's life events occurred
The Person Profile loads with all of this data.

Finally, there are a few links at the bottom of most pages:

These links also appear in the menus described above.

Detailed Person Profiles for every person in my database form the core of Robin's Roots. You can you can find Person Profiles through various search forms and via hyperlinks
Search forms and results for
- Cemeteries,
- Places where events have occurred,
- Sources that have supplied information to my database,
- Media Items attached to people, families, and events,
- and many other objects.
Surnames - A list of family names in the database, and then a list of all of the people with that family name
Dates Report - People who were born, died, married, etc. on any given day.

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End of Page Layout and Navigational Menus

Sources, Citations, & Media

Sources are books, records, censuses, collections of official documents (e.g. Texas Birth Records), people, events (e.g. a family reunion) and other "things" that supply information that a genealogist uses to substantiate genealogical information. Some sources are, of course, available online for free, others require paid memberships to a web site such as Ancestry.com. And others aren't online at all.
Sources are sometimes arbitrarily and inconsistently defined, e.g.
- A book is pretty clearly a single source - except sometimes when a "book" consists of multiple volumes, and especially when those multiple volumes are published at different times.
- A description, say, of a cemetery and the people buried there might be published independently, but also be published as an article in a journal that has weekly, monthly, or annual issues.
- Each 10-year U.S. Census is generally considered to be one big source, but states, counties, and cities have also published censuses.
- Ancestry.com, which supplied most of my data and automatically defined sources for me, takes the website FindAGrave.com, and abitrarily divides it up as a separate source for each state (even though the web site has no such breakdown, except in its search page).
Citations are the uses of a Source within a record - mostly a person's record, but also a family record. A citation refers to a source, and then it is supposed to say exactly where the information used in the person's record is within the source, and it is supposed to have a transcription of that information. But very often, it simply refers to the Source without any more specifics.
Note that the term "citation" isn't really used on this web site, though citations are there. That is, when you look at the "Sources" in a person's record (they are at the bottom of the person profile), you're really seeing "Citations", each of which does refer to a Source.
In the list of so-called "Sources" for a person, the citations are numbered starting from 1, and each citation includes
1. The Source number, as a hyperlink, which links to the Source detail page.
2. The Source title
3. Values describing the Source, such as author, publisher, and date of publication.
  On the Source Detail page, these values are clearly shown as separate fields, but in the list of Citations, they are run together in one string enclosed in parenthesis, and displayed on the same line as the Source Title.
4. Values describing where the citation occurs within the source. These can vary greatly among sources. Some sources, (such as a U.S. Census) are very complex, and the citation can be long and hard to understand. Because of the variety of Source types and source citations, citations are not broken down into fields that can be displayed in a labeled table. for easy reading, as Source and Person fields arecan be so Different sources can have different v or, for censuses, the state and so-called "Enumeration District". Unfortunately, to add to the confusion, the citation data is displayed immediately after the source data in such a way that it's hard to distinguish between them.
5. A transcription of the actual text in the source that describes the person or family, and that thus support the "fact" stored in the database.
Note that items d and/or e are often missing, so that the citation reference is really, in effect, a direct source reference.

Note that a (real) source can be used by more than one person-source (i.e. citation) in a record. For instance, if a person's birth is described on page 82 of a book, and the same person's death is described on page 102, the citation that supports the birth fact will will refer to page 82 of the book, and the citation that supports the death fact will refer to page 102 of the book.
Media - as used by the TNG package, which is the engine behind this web site - are online images and documents that are associated with a person or a source. In TNG, there are several specific media categories. At this point, I use four:
1. Photos - Photographs of people and places, and associated with a person. Actually, a photograph can be associated with multiple people; I don't have to have 10 copies of a family photo of 10 people in order to associate that photo with all 10 people.
2. Documents - Scanned or photographed copies of wills, census logs, death certificates, marriage records, etc. Documents images are associated with citations, but that relationship isn't really clear on the web site.
3. Histories - HTML pages, Word documents, and/or scanned documents (including book pages) that don't just describe an event (like Documents), but that describe a person or family. Mini-biographies scanned from books or written specifically to be attached to a persons database record are classified as Histories.
4. Headstones - Photographs of headstones are classified separately, and, with TNG, can be associated both with a person and a cemetery.

How Documents are related to Sources and people

When you look at a person's record, and select "media" detail, you'll see media items broken out by the four categories listed above. Photographs, Histories, and Headstones are pretty cleanly associated with that person. But document images are associated with citations within the person's record, and indirectly associated with sources.

Within the "Documents" section of the Media list:

The document image is an image of the portion of the source associated with a citation, even though the document images don't refer to citations at all.
The filename of the document image generally is derived from name of the source associated with the citation. But that filename relationship is not consistent.

When you select a document image either by clicking on the image thumnail or the image filename, you'll be taken to a media detail page that shows (among other things)

The image within an onscreen tool that lets you zoom in on portions of the image or pop it out into a separate window,
The people and source that the document image links to.

From there, you can see information about the source, or the other people, but you cannot ever see the citation associated with an image. nor is it defined in the database.

By the way, U.S. Censuses are good examples of document images that are typically associated with more than one person. For instance, from my grandfather Brady Horton's record, if you display the Media, and click on the document titled "1900 United States Federal Census", you'll see a list of everyone who was listed on that census page.

Within the Sources List in a person's record:

You see all of the citations, and the sources that they link to./li>
You can click on the hyperlinked Source ID to see details of the Source.
But you can't tell which citations/sources have document images; you can only tell that from the Media section of the person's record.

Pages that demonstrate the functionality of and TNG, the web application that drives it.

(If you shift-click on any link on this page, the link will open in a new browser window, and depending on the way you have windows laid on on your screen, you may be to see both that page and this page's description of the it. In addition, if you follow links from the new page, you don't have to worry about navigating back to this page, because this window will remain open!)

TNG is the web-based software product that drives Robin's Roots. Thus most of the functionality and appearance of Robin's Roots is derived from TNG.

TNG's website contains links to upwards of 100 TNG sites, and, in a sense, those sites can serve as TNG demos.

These specific pages on Robin's Roots provide a more focused demonstration TNG's features and some of my customization s

"Person Profiles" of
- My grandfather, Clarence Richmond, Sr. and
- one of my great, great, grandfathers, Judge Levi Trewhitt, a prominent lawyer in Cleveland Tennessee who died in a Confederate prison camp after being unjustly (and notoriously) jailed along with dozens non-combatant East Tennesse community leaders.
From a user perspective, Person Profiles for every person in a TNG site form the core of the site. Person profiles contain essentially everthing that the database knows about a person, such as
1. Data that describes that person
  - As in essentially all genealogy application, what we might think of as data elements or fields associated with a person (e.g. birth, death, burial, occupation, residence, immigration) are defined as "events". Each type of event can occur multiple times (e.g. multiple occupation, residence, and education events), and each event occurrence can associated with a date and a place.
  - TNG can define any type of event that is useful to them; perhaps specific elements of military service, civic involvement, honorary positions, and even friends and associates.
2. Parents, spouses, children, and possibly grandchildren, grandparents, and inlaws, and perhaps (depending on site configuration), the oldest and/or most distant ancestors,
3. Links to several types of dynamically-generated ancestor and dependant charts and reports that are based on (which often means "start with") the profiled person.
4. Stories, photos, scanned documents, audio recordings, videos and other media albums, all of which can also be linked to other people in the site,
5. Data sources and citations,
6. Maps based on the locations of the person's life events.
7. DNA profiles, and more.
Two ways of depicting a nuclear family (a couple and their children):
1. Graphical "Family Charts", which extends the nuclear family by including the siblings and parents of the parents of the nuclear family, but which presents very little information about each person - just name, name, birth year, and death year.
  - For example, My great great grandarents, Flavius Josephus Hutcheson and Narcissa Ann Myers.
    (He had quite a name for the son of dirt farmers from central Tennessee, didn't he?)
2. "Family Group Sheets", which contain more data but not in a graphical format.
  - For example, my Wikipedia worthy immigrant ancestors, Nathaniel Dickinson and Anne Binks who were more persistent than "Joe" Hutcheson's parents in theme that they applied to their children.
and a structured but not graphical "Family Group Sheet", such as
A Family Group Sheet for my great-great grandparents Azre Horton and Sarah Hamby Depictions of a nuclear family a "nuclear family", consisting of couple and their children. The two primary ways of depicting family pages a the graphical "Family Chart" and a structThe Family Group Sheet and Family Chart for my paternal grandparents, Clarence Richmond and Edith Hutcheson.

Confusingly, the term "family" can refer to
- A large extended family (perhaps an entire database),
- Any number of subsets of that family (these are often also called branches) (e.g. the descendants of a person at the top of a branch, the ancestors of a mother, who would introduce a new surname, or the descendants of a husband who introduces a new name, and many others.
- What we think of as a nuclear family (a couple and their children
- Ancestor and Descendant charts in numerous formats, all of which are generated dynamically for any person in the database.
  - Descendants:
    1. A graphical representation of six generations of descendants from one of my immigrant ancestors, Francis Billingsley, who came to Maryland (via Virginia) by about 1650.
      You can see how this format could quickly become rather unweildy, both in that this spare format sometimes results in just a few people being visible on a screen and it than there is no straighforward way to print a web page that is wider than one sheet of paper.
    2. A more manageable compact graphical representation of the same people,
    3. A more printable, customzable, and data-rich outline-format descendancy chart, again, showing the same people.
      This format, which is narrower and longer than the graphical charts, has its own problems, but it can include more far more data and cover more generations while maintaining a printable width.
    4. A classic "Register Chart" which includes notes and expands data into sentences such as "James Madison married Dolley Payne on 15 Apr 1794 in (a place). Dolley (Daughter of John Payne and Mary Coles) was born..."
  - Ancestors:
    1. A representation of a standard 5-generation pedigree chart.
      As with the graphical descendancy charts, these get unweildy when you go beyond 5 or 6 generations
    2. A verticalchart.php?personID=I20158&tree=rr&parentset=&display=vertical&generations=4">Vertical Chart, with the ancestors at the top.
      It gets very wide quickly, but still, it is more compact than a standard pedigree chart,
    3. A remarkable ancestral "Fan Chart", which you just have to take a look at. (Remember, Fan Charts, like all of these charts, can be generated dynamically for anyone in the database.)
    4. An even more remarkable Ancestral map,
      The map pin color scheme (which works fine in the Person Profile app) doesn't work well here, but the legend next to the map does help a lot. You might want to start with fewer generations

TNG - The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding

800,800

TNG and its niche in the world of Genealogy and Family Tree websites
Large websites such as Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, Geni.com, and FamilySearch.com bring millions of people to their sites to do research and build family trees. Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch provide many data resources - books, journals, census records, state and local birth, death, and marriage records, etc.

On Ancestry and MyHeritage, users build their own trees, using that source data, using hints that are automatically generated by the site and copying freely (and too often cavalierly) from other trees.

FamilySearch and Geni don't support personal trees; they build a single tree that subscribers can modify, though they have different ways of controlling who can edit what.

Among these four sites, only FamilySearch provides a way to print ancestor or descendant graphs and charts

TNG, on the other hand, is not a collaborative website like the ones described just above. In fact, it is not a website at all. It is a software product that captures and stores family tree data and displays that data in web pages on each customer's own website, where the customers have complete control of their data.

TNG is very much like home computer products such as Family Tree Maker, Roots Magic, Family Historian, etc., in that that it provides robust data entry, data analysis, and reporting features to its customers (i.e. the people who purchased and installed it.)

TNG is very different from those products in that it is a web application. That is, it runs on a web server and thus requires internet access and a web browser. TNG's fundamental feature is that data stored on a TNG site is always and only visible as web pages.
Importantly, each site owner has robust control over who can see which components of the data on a site. For example, on virtually all sites, data on living people is restricted to specified logged-in users. And many sites don't allow people without accounts to see anything other than high-level statistics

TNG sites

Most TNG sites are about one (often very extended) family, and are managed by a single person.
(For instance, Robin's Roots has about 11,00 people who are relatedto me by blood or marriage. (And, believe it or not, my database is not particularly large.)

Other sites cover people who
Share a surname but who aren't necessarly be related,
Have members who live in, come from, or settled in a particular geographic region,

Have family who served in specific military units or wars,

Have ancestors who emigrated or immigrated in a particular wave of immigration, or

Are related to members of club or association (e.g. a local genealogy club or DAR chapter), etc.

See notes about technological aspects of TNG

TNG technology notes

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TNG customers and their technology skills:

TNG customers (like me) purchase it for about $40, (which would still be cheap at several times that price)

TNG customers then install TNG on a website (though some do use a consultant or hosting service), and become "site administors". They can also be thought of as "TNG users" - not to be confused with the users (often referred to as "end users") of a TNG site.

Some TNG customers (like me) are web developers and/or designers who already host our own websites, but most TNG customers are simply savvy enough about computers and the internet to sign up with a web hosting service (usually for about $10-20 per month), copy the TNG code to their web server, and use TNG's software to configure their sites.

Many TNG site administors do know HTML, and some are skilled at web page design, but No programming, web design, or database management knowledge or skills is required.
Of course, it quite useful to have some understanding of HTML and CSS, and some experience defining queries and reports in tools such as Microsoft Access.

Essentially, anyone who can navigate and copy files across a home network, configure printers and other devices, define headers and footers with word processors and spreadsheet programs, and use "cloud-based" photo and file backup services is likely to be able to set up and manage a TNG site.

TNG is a full-fledged and very configurable database application with comprehensive data entry, display, and reporting feature features.

The data on a given TNG site may be entered directly into TNG or imported from an extract generated by a PC genealogy application or a collaborative website such as the ones mentioned above.

TNG web pages are built from customizable design templates. Several TNG-specific templates come with the application and others can be purchased from an independant vendor. Custom template can also be derived from website design and construction tools such as WordPress and Drupal.

TNG programs are written in the programming language PHP. Programmers who know (or learn) PHP can potentially modify any part of their own site.

Programers can also package their modifications as "mods" that can be shared with other TNG sites. Site administrators can choose from over 300 mods to customize their sites. (Not all mods are compatible, of course). Site administrators can also "uninstall" mods that they no longer want to use.
Robin's Roots is fairly heavily modified. It uses upwards of 60 mods, most of which I wrote!
.
From an end-user's perspective, the core of the application is a profile for each person in the database. The profile includes features such as

Essentially as much data and as many notes as you want to define.
As in essentially all genealogy application, what we might think of as data elements or fields associated with a person (e.g. birth, death, burial, occupation, residence, immigration) are are defined as "events". Each type of event can occur multiple times (e.g. multiple occupation, residence, and education events), and each event occurrence can associated with a date and a place.

TNG can define any type of event that is useful to them; perhaps specific elements of military service, civic involvement, honorary positions, and even friends and associates.

Parents, children, and (depending on the configuration) grandchildren, grandparents, inlaws, the oldest ancestor in a line, and so on,

Links to several types of ancestor and dependant charts and reports, which are configurable and can be generated dynamically. That is, each website visitor can select any person, and generate reports and charts that reflect the data as it exists at that moment.

Stories, photos, scanned documents, audio recordings, videos and other media albums, all of which can be linked to other people in the site,
Data sources and citations,
Maps based on the locations of the person's (or their family's) life events.

DNA profiles, and more.

TNG maintains lists of all places, media items, and several other objects that are referenced in the database. Those lists can be searched, and individual records can be described in some detail. For example, media items can be associate with places as well as people, places can be shown on maps, and all events associated with a place can be listed.

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This help text window can be dragged out of the way to make the underlying text visible so you can see the underlying text

If you have any questions or comments about the information on this site, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.
-Robin Richmond

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