Rosemary Lockie's Family History

About my Family History Data

The information I've collected whilst researching my Family History is displayed on this site in several sections. On separate webpages there are:-
  1. My (direct) Ancestor Charts, for which there is:

  2. A collection of Rosemary's Databases, featuring some of the above Surnames.

  3. Various items I've collected personally during my research.

  4. Information I've collected with the assistance of others. This includes Photograph and Memorial Inscriptions on my Family and Local History Pages [this is now a separate site]

  5. This page also provides information about the software I've used to generate the webpages, and some background information about my Family History research.

Rosemary's Graduation, 1969
Graduation, 1969

Mrs and Miss Reeves
Mrs and Miss Reeves

About the Software

My Ancestor Charts were created with the assistance of GED2HTML v3.5e by Eugene Stark, a program which converts a GEDCOM file to linked .htm (or .html) files such as my Index of Surnames and List of Individuals. Its customised output has allowed me to produce pages which match the look and feel of the rest of my site.

The collection of Rosemary's Databases is presented on this website using software to which I own the copyright, to extract information from dBase IV files contained on my home computer. Information about living individuals is excluded; however a United Kingdom Act of 1997 covers the compiling and use of database material, and the notice below is displayed in order to give me protection under this Act:

Database Right: All databases used for this website are covered by the 1997 Database Regulations. Rosemary Lockie (and others as stated on the relevant pages) are the makers of the databases used for this website and the owner(s) of the database rights. First published in 1997.


About my Family History Research

I began researching my Family History in 1985, and very soon after began assembling the data I collected on computer, initially with the aim of producing a listing in parish order of the IGI entries for GODDARD - my maiden surname. In the thrill of the pursuit however, I quickly lost sight of my original aim, and became entranced by the process of recording the past on computer. At the time, there were no off-the-shelf packages available for home computer use (I had an Amstrad PCW); so as I used to earn my living as a computer programmer, the obvious way forward was to write my own.

I developed keyboard macros to avoid endless repetition of oft-used names; another essential was to group forename-spelling variants together, which I achieved by including an abbreviated, or coded version of each forename in the database - the IGI didn't have this until 1993! At first, I took the simplest approach, by having a look-up table which I kept in step with my keyboard activity, so that whenever a new variant was added, the entry software would ask for a code. This worked very well on the PCW, but once I switched to a PC found - paradoxically - that it was too slow! Hence I developed a "sound-alike" conversion, which reduced the number of entries in the lookup tables to acceptable proportions.

The first versions of my databases on the PCW were assembled using a very nice variant of BASIC called Mallard BASIC, not exactly unique to the PCW, but GW-BASIC, the nearest equivalent on the PC, was sadly lacking in one important feature - JETSAM access. JETSAM provided a means to access sequential files by means of indexes. So whilst I was able to copy the data itself over to my PC, I could no longer use the same software. So instead, I imported the files into dBase for DOS, and I've used this ever since for data entry. However, since I got online (September 1992) I've had very little time for developing this system, or indeed for adding a significant amount of data to my collection.

It does however still work, and still does what it was designed for - finding a particular event, sorting and filtering (on forename, date, parents, &c), with a reminder of the source, either where I found it, or who gave me the information. Records can be displayed in either forename/date order, or parish/date order, and subjected to the SQL query of your choice, gift wrapped, if you wish, using dBase language for producing web pages!

If some of the fields seem a little short of detail please remember this system was designed when the average hard disk was a "massive" 40MB (megabytes) - not the 40GB (gigabytes) which is more standard today! And yes, by the time you read this, 40GB will have been superseded too...

But we were grateful for each and every byte of that 40MB... Aye, them were they days... tell that to youngsters these days, and they just won't believe you... ;-)

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This is a Genealogy Website
URL of this page: https://wishful-thinking.org.uk/roses.html
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